When Donald J. Trump fired the opening shots in a trade war during his first term, Chinese officials often took days to respond and Chinese businesses followed every threat with alarm.
But this week, after the Biden administration broadened its restrictions on advanced technology that could be sent to China, Beijing announced sweeping retaliation in a single day. The country’s stock market investors mostly shrugged at the Biden administration’s action.
And on Wednesday, General Motors, a onetime cornerstone of American industrial might, said it was taking a $5 billion hit to profit to recognize that it was no longer able to adequately compete with Chinese carmakers.
The fast-moving developments have underlined how far China has come as an industrial superpower, and its readiness for a potentially bruising battle with the second Trump administration. China now has a manufacturing sector that is larger than those of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain put together. It produces some of the world’s most advanced technology.
There are a few areas in which China has not caught up with the United States, with the most advanced semiconductors perhaps being the most prominent. But in many other sectors, including all but the fastest semiconductors, its manufacturers are coming close to ending their dependence on American supplies.
That was evident in the announcement on Tuesday by four government-linked trade associations that urged Chinese companies making everything from cars to communications equipment to be wary of buying any more American computer chips.
“The Chinese chip industry is stronger now than eight years ago, so we can make such a strong declaration,” said Hu Xijin, an influential nationalistic commentator in China. “Eight years ago, such a declaration was unthinkable,” said Mr. Hu, who has nearly 25 million followers on social media.
Beijing’s other response to Washington on Tuesday, involving minerals, also highlighted China’s new willingness to publicly and directly confront foreign trading partners. The Ministry of Commerce, in a statement on its website, said it had banned with immediate effect the export of four critical minerals to the United States that were mined or processed mainly in China.
When China imposed a two-month export embargo on rare earth metals to Japan in 2010, by contrast, it did so in complete secrecy. The commerce ministry called in representatives of two dozen companies, told them not to export and warned them that they would lose their export licenses if they told the news media.
The most recent sign of China’s industrial muscle came in the profit charges by General Motors, which the company has incurred while restructuring its China joint venture with SAIC Motor. When Mr. Trump took office in early 2017, the Chinese ventures of G.M. and Volkswagen were locked in a long-running battle for leadership in China while domestic brands lagged far behind.
But G.M. brands that used to rank among the leaders in China sales, like Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac, no longer even rank among the top 20. BYD, a Chinese electric car manufacturer based in Shenzhen, is now the best-selling brand in China and is rapidly stepping up exports to the rest of the world.
When G.M. opened an assembly line in Shanghai in 1998, the company showed off the several dozen robots it had imported from outside China. But when Volkswagen — Germany’s signature automaker — opened an electric car assembly plant last year in Hefei, China, it ordered just one robot imported from its home country. V.W. bought the other 1,074 robots from a factory in Shanghai.
And while G.M.’s decision to open an assembly line in Shanghai in the late 1990s to build 100,000 Buicks a year was a big bet on the Chinese market, BYD is now building an industrial complex in Hefei with the capacity to make 1.5 million cars a year.
China has used tariffs and other fiscal policies to help its homegrown companies gain an advantage: It charges taxes totaling as much as 100 percent on imported cars and sport utility vehicles with large gasoline engines, a category in which G.M. is strong. By contrast, electric cars from Chinese manufacturers face a tax rate of only 13 percent.
So G.M. and its Detroit rivals have long been unable to sell more than a trickle of cars from the United States in China. Now even their sales of gasoline-powered cars from factories inside China have plunged as more than half of Chinese buyers choose battery-electric or plug-in hybrid cars.
The big question now is how the Trump administration will respond to China’s assertive stance. For decades, China has fairly consistently sold about $4 worth of goods to the United States for every $1 worth of goods that it buys. That imbalance partly reflects Beijing’s many tariffs and informal limits on imports, as well as an enormous government effort during nearly two decades to replace imported manufactured goods with domestic production.
Overall Sino-American trade has grown rapidly. So the lopsided ratio has translated into a large American trade deficit.
China’s overall trade surplus in manufactured goods, mainly but not entirely with the United States, now equals a tenth of the country’s entire economic output. That surplus has created millions of factory jobs in China. But it also means China has more to lose than the United States does in a broad trade war.
Chinese officials appear to be preparing for a world in which they do not seek confrontation with the United States, but are prepared for the two countries to pursue their own economic paths. Their preferred term for that course: “peaceful coexistence.”
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