Chinese manufacturing went through three phases:
- We can save money by moving our jobs overseas. Sure, it'll blow up our lead times and we'd have to ship goods across the Pacific thrice, but China has 3x the population of the US and the Yuan depreciation makes paying them very cheap.
- We can't move our jobs back to the US! We're all tooled up in China, and everyone else followed us there. If we moved back to the US it'd blow up our lead times and we'd have to ship goods across the Pacific thrice. Plus, we literally can't hire enough people in the US, because China is buying our product just as much as they make it now.
- We are moving production back to the US because our Chinese factory has been shut down for three months due to COVID and it ate through our buffer for shipping delays at the ports. Again. Yes, we will be paying far more for fewer workers, but getting goods across the Pacific is getting more and more expensive anyway and we're losing on money from not having goods to sell every other week.
We are at the third step.
[0] Yes I am aware of the irony of using the title of a right-libertarian political diatribe to describe the actions of a left-authoritarian dictator.