[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

American officials usually accuse China of trying to take over our manufacturing, but that’s old news. China took over our manufacturing long ago. And the parts it still hasn’t taken over are usually the parts that it doesn’t want or that are too uneconomical to be worth taking over.

Taking over America’s manufacturing was never China’s endgame. Taking over our economy is.

Undercutting, stealing and dumping its way to manufacturing supremacy was how China got its foot in our door. Americans came to think of China as an assembly line for cheap junk, but the cheap junk built China’s production capacity. The next step was moving up to components for bigger products and then the products themselves. Once the components were being made in China, it made more sense for the companies to simplify by moving everything to China.

China’s undercutting of American manufacturers convinced many of them that profitability and survival lay in closing down U.S. factories and moving their production eastward, lured by the promise of lower costs and access to a growing market. But China quickly demonstrated that it could copy any product, no matter how large or sophisticated, and rip off any brand or IP.

By moving their production to China, American companies gave away their intellectual property and their R&D and all of their methods allowing China to rapidly produce copycat products.

At every stage, American leaders and companies refused to take China’s ambition to be more than our 99-cent store seriously. When China stopped going after our manufacturing and came after retailers, it took them by surprise. China had been signaling its intention to move away from low-end manufacturing businesses, sticking them in Vietnam, experimenting with Africa and focusing on Xinjiang whose large Turkic Muslim population were rapidly turned into a cheap and dirty labor workforce for the western markets in what human rights activists misleadingly describe as ‘concentration camps’. China had bigger plans for its own people and economy

And for us.

Go to Amazon and sign up as a third-party seller for the United States market and you’ll find more Chinese banks than American ones. Amazon dominates American retail and Chinese third-party sellers dominate Amazon, along with eBay and other American ecommerce platforms. Disguised by its obnoxious billion dollar shows, its founder’s mega-yacht and the ubiquity of its smiley swoosh boxes, Amazon long ago became a platform for Chinese sellers. But China quickly showed the ability to create their own successful platforms like Temu and Shein.

While American social media platforms, which weren’t allowed to operate in China, believed that at least those Chinese companies would be dependent on them to harvest big data and advertise their wares to customers, the launch of TikTok and China’s takeover of gaming platforms showed that hope was also futile. Chinese retailers use Chinese social media platforms to hawk products to Americans. Even as President Trump tried to fight back with tariffs, Chinese manufacturers turned to TikTok, recruiting American influencers to urge Americans to download Chinese shopping apps and buy copycat products directly from them.

Much like COVID-19, this can be seen as a test and in economic terms, a more crucial one.

China has assembled all the building blocks for taking over our economy. It has hijacked our manufacturing from the ground up. What began with 99-cent store fare now includes high-end smartphones, ebikes and laptops. Its hackers and employees from Silicon Valley to our defense industry provide pipelines of stolen techniques, trade secrets and R&D to supplement whatever we haven’t exported already to provide China with assured manufacturing supremacy.

After swallowing our manufacturing, China began consuming our retail sector. Amazon cannibalized our brick and mortar retail by dumping Chinese products in America on a massive scale, but Chinese retailers cannibalized Amazon and turned it into a front for their products. China’s retailers have been figuring out how to rapidly move products into this country, how to set up warehouses and eventually how to master rapid last-mile delivery. And then Amazon will have nothing more to offer Americans than a billion-dollar woke version of Lord of the Rings.

But if Chinese retailers need to, they can also make a diverse show with transgender elves and black dwarves. And they’ll be able to do it at a fraction of the cost that Amazon did.

Even the dot coms that drive the stock market have not proven to be immune from China’s reach. The Chinese employees who serve as cheap labor in Silicon Valley took the secrets and techniques home with them. TikTok proved that China could launch social media platforms aimed at dumb teens. Recent games and gaming company acquisitions show that China can compete in gaming and esports. If this goes on, Chinese companies will dominate content consumption for American teens even as Amazon spends $10 billion a year on woke shows.

Chinese social media platforms will drive American teens to Chinese shopping apps and platforms to buy Chinese products using Chinese AI tech. The only role American workers will have in this economy will be to drive the delivery trucks over to your house. And even that will be supplemented by Chinese drones and autonomous delivery vehicles.

And what will happen to America’s economy? We’ll be reduced to a third world country.

After gobbling up manufacturing and retail, China will continue to nibble away at whatever parts of our service economy that it wants to outsource. Finance will also move to China as those Chinese products will be bought from Chinese platforms with Chinese loan apps. American objections to these intrusions will be steamrolled the way that objections to the destruction of our manufacturing were with lectures about the virtues of free trade, of the incredible wealth that a trade deficit blesses us with and with the American cutouts for China’s economic invasion whose businesses will depend on carving up the rest of our economy and shipping it eastward.

If this sounds too fantastic, much of this is already here. Gen X bought ‘Made in China’ products in American stores, Millennials bought them on Amazon, Gen Z buys them in Chinese apps. Gen X watched ads on network television from American companies for products made in China. Millennials clicked on Amazon affiliate links to Chinese products on American websites. Gen Z watches TikTok videos of American influencers pitch them on installing Temu.  Once generative AI is fully up to speed, the influencers, as the last to be eaten, will also be replaced.

American retail is turning into a wasteland just like the Rust Belt did. Today’s department store is yesterday’s defunct manufacturing plant. Coastal cities are promising to bring back retail the way that midwestern towns once promised to bring back factories. The Amazon warehouses dotting the landscape seemed to offer some relief allowing American workers to pick up a few dollars packing up Chinese junk before putting it on trucks. But those warehouses are only an intermediate step in destroying American retail by pandering to American consumers. Once there’s no competition, free one-day shipping won’t be needed to dump products in America.

That is why President Trump launched another bid to stop China before it’s too late. There have been plenty of warnings about China’s economic warfare over the years, but too few of them understood what was at stake or the scale of their plans to destroy our economy. Like a virus, China parasitically infiltrated our economy while at every stage always moving upward.

If we don’t decouple our economy from China soon, we’ll have no economy left to decouple.