>It's seems uncommon for people to consider if our trade with China before this "war" was fair.
So, I'm not an expert, but... my understanding is that China is accused of subsidizing domestic manufacturing. Analogous to the sort of dumping that uber and lyft do, really; Much like how Softbank subsidizes my ride to work in the hope that they can jack up prices once I get really used to it, the Chinese government is subsidizing my consumer goods purchases, with the hope that manufacturing will decline elsewhere to the point where they can some day jack up prices to market-clearing levels.
I mean, is that fair? no. Is this something the market does on the regular, even without government having a hand in it? yes. Is this bad for the USA? If we lose manufacturing ability, probably... but this has been going on for a generation now. How long would it take us to re-gain or move the manufacturing of our consumer goods? (we already keep manufacturing of defense goods in the USA, for exactly this reason. My own guess is that if there was economic reason to move more high-touch human labor intensive manufacturing in-house, we'd make like BMW and build plants in South Carolina and similar places with fewer unions, and we already do a bunch of automated manufacturing here.) - the implication here is that just like Uber and softbank, I am not sure this is a long-term profitable thing for China to do, and I have the (controversial) opinion that the market in the USA is healthy enough that if we needed to build more manufacturing here, we could do it pretty quickly)
(I mean, the other side of this, the complex part that I personally don't entirely understand is that the USA subsidizes a lot of domestic industry, too... most famously the agriculture sector. As a us citizen, I totally support my tax dollars being used to make sure that we overproduce food. That seems like an extremely reasonable thing to do. (it does get more complex when that food is sold elsewhere, but I am not an expert) - My understanding is that the US also subsidizes a lot of US manufacturing... I mean, my feelings on that are more mixed... but I personally don't see subsidies as inherently evil or incompatible with doing lots of trade with another country.)
>It seems like most people just parrot: "War. Bad."
We're talking about a trade war here, which is a different sort of animal.
Please understand that I'm saying "Trade: good" - a subtle difference. And I do think that trade is usually good, even trade with someone who is subsidizing their goods.
(I have... very different feelings about trade sanctions, about restrictions on trade as a way to get a country, say, to respect human rights. But I don't think that's what the trade war with China is about; the trade war with China, as I understand it, is about tariffs and subsidies)