> China’s embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade.

That is equivalent to saying that the Chinese have been as good businessmen as the Americans.

"Embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade" is a phrase that is equally applicable to USA.

For decades USA had succeeded by various means of bribing and blackmailing to destroy the local industries in many countries, based on the propaganda about a free global trade, forcing those countries to not protect in any way their industries that competed with US companies, because supposedly if they bought instead cheaper and better US products that will be a win-win situation, even if they become dependent on USA, but they should not worry because USA can be trusted as a commercial partner and will always provide those products in advantageous terms.

But in the recent years, USA has made a U-turn, and now it makes desperate attempts to protect its own industries in the same way that it had forbidden other countries to do and moreover USA has invented bogus legal theories that when any products that contain even a few percent of parts with a US origin are sold to someone, the buyers do not own what they have bought, but USA has the right to dictate to them what to do with those products, so that now everybody knows that USA cannot be trusted as a commercial partner and buying anything from it must be avoided.

The Chinese may have used many unfair commercial tactics, but this is really not something that Americans may criticize, because since WWII USA has been a champion of unfair commercial tactics, of which most Americans do not appear to be aware.

As an example, I have seen in USA comments that when NATO has expanded by incorporating many Eastern European countries, that was a favor made to those. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Those countries were forced to buy their memberships with many billions of $. They were blackmailed to accept in exchange for their membership to make contracts worth of many billions for buying products or services from certain US companies at greatly inflated prices, so certain well-connected US shareholders must have gained a lot of money from the NATO expansion.

This was a single example, but it was just typical for how USA has always acted in the global trade since WWII, by using any means possible to gain commercial advantages for its major companies.

If one subscribes to the theory that the only mission of any company is to make as much money for its shareholders as possible, and that the state should assist in this objective, one can see the behavior of USA as legitimate, but then the fact that China was clever enough to also ensure as much profit for its industries as possible is equally legitimate.

As non-American and non-Chinese, I dislike equally their dominance in the global trade. In my opinion, the only way that would benefit to the entire mankind is to not have the production of anything concentrated in a single country or in a couple of countries, but it should be possible to produce locally everywhere any of the products that a human needs, from food and clothes to electronic components. The advantages in avoiding excessive dependencies from others far outweigh any economies of scale of mass production.

A half of century ago, this was not an unusual economic model, e.g. many US companies were licensing their IP to local producers in various countries, so they could produce there things that had been designed in USA, instead of importing finished products and becoming dependent. Nowadays companies are much greedier, so they are no longer content with a modest revenue from licensing, but they want to milk all the profit that can be obtained by being the only source for the end product, without alternatives, so patents and the like are used only for preserving a quasi-monopoly position, by preventing competition.

USA and China are free to act in their own best interests, but other countries should make much more serious efforts to reduce their external dependencies.