The U.S. Treasury Secretary underestimated China's counterattack determination - he admitted that China has a lot of money and a huge trade deficit, believing that China cannot survive without the U.S. market and will compromise with the United States due to the trade tariff war.

But the reality is that our industrial chain has long stopped relying on a single market.

The new energy vehicle export data best illustrates the problem.

Last year, China's electric vehicle exports surged by 83% year-on-year, with European market orders booked until 2025. Volkswagen headquarters in Germany even established a "China Technology Coordination Team". A domestic car company executive revealed during a live broadcast: "German engineers now come to visit the workshop, holding their phones to record everything, and even want close-ups of the screw-tightening robotic arms."

What causes more anxiety for the West is the breakthrough in technology. While German automakers are still testing 500-kilometer endurance batteries in the lab, BYD's Blade Battery has achieved 15-minute charging for 450 kilometers of range. At the Munich Auto Show, a technical director of a German brand looked at the Chinese exhibition stand and sighed: "They have covered in three years what took us ten years."

The chip blockade has instead sparked a wave of self-research and development. Huawei's 5G vehicle system has been installed in millions of mass-produced vehicles, and over 200 days of stable operation have been achieved by 500 autonomous driving taxis on Shanghai streets. A recent post on Silicon Valley engineer forums has gone viral: "After reverse-engineering the code of China's autonomous driving system, I found they skipped three traditional algorithm steps."

The trade war turning point is more intriguing. The list of tariffs imposed by the United States on China keeps getting longer, while direct investment from China to the U.S. has decreased by 55% year-on-year. The latest data from Shandong Port shows that cargo shipments to Europe have increased by 37%, while North American routes have been reduced by 28%. An export boss complained in an industry group: "Now accepting orders from the United States feels like defusing a bomb; we first need to calculate who will bear the 25% tariff."

The resilience of the industrial chain exceeds all expectations. Tesla's Shanghai factory has reached a domestication rate of 95%. Japanese experts who disassembled China's photovoltaic modules discovered that core material suppliers are distributed across six provinces including Gansu and Ningxia. The most dramatic case is American soybeans - last year, China's import volume from Brazil surged by 68%, and the newly built storage base of China National Grain Reserves in Argentina was filled with golden soybeans as soon as it was completed.

The global industrial landscape is being restructured. The latest front page title of the German "Handelsblatt" reads "Classroom Exchange," with a picture showing Mercedes-Benz engineers taking notes in CATL's workshop. What is even more thought-provoking is that Walmart recently moved its annual procurement conference from Chicago to Yiwu. 2000 American buyers held translation devices and went shopping in the business district.

The most blackly humorous part of this game is the tariff backlash - U.S. inflation data has exceeded expectations for six consecutive months, and netizens have taken pictures of supermarket shelves in Los Angeles pasted with "Made in China" out-of-stock notices. According to calculations by The Economist, American households pay an additional $1300 annually due to tariffs on China, which is just enough to buy two of the latest Chinese-made robot vacuum cleaners.

Original source: https://www.toutiao.com/article/1829374306745436/

Disclaimer: This article solely represents the author's views.