lkorrow,
There are a number of ways globalization (aka "not made here") can end. For the current scheme to have run for even as long as it has, energy needed to be essentially free. Otherwise shipping costs alone would make it absurdly expensive.
The other thing is that without fiat on both ends things could never have gone on nearly this long and would, surely, have ended a long time ago. When the USD loses reserve status stuff from China will double or triple in cost over night and oil/fertilzer/food etc will too. That which we currently print dollars to buy will have to be traded for something of real value. What is that going to be.
And, of course, probably 80% of our population lacks either the intelligence or the education, or both, to work in high tech manufacturing so getting low tech manufacturing back is probably going to be required before too long.
What China "needs" doesn't really matter when the fiat game of floating and worthless currencies comes to an end.
If we had an asset based currency the importing of goods from china and elsewhere would have produced massive deflation, as we had to give up gold on demand to dollar holders. That would have lowered costs of locally manufactured things and increased costs of imports until the exodus of manufacturing and money stopped. So what we did with the money supply was kind of like sticking quarters in a fuse box in order to keep drawing more and more power when a fuse would have blown. Eventually, of course, you get a huge fire which burns the house to the ground. Don't mistake the fact that the house hasn't YET seen that fire to mean that the fire isn't coming.
This isn't conjecture. Globalization as we know it WILL end because it violates laws of math, physics, and economics in so many ways.
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