It's incredible it took them this long, after so many jobs have already been lost due to dubious practices China has employed for the last two decades, that middle class jobs have significantly stagnated in the west.
The whole problem is, once even just a single company decides to outsource any work to a country where existing, asymmetric commercial-government relationships exist that make their service cost anticompetitive by design, its closest competitors must by definition follow suit to remain competitive (i.e. stay in business)—meaning, in the sufficient long run, just about every industry besides those that cannot be outsourced (in the limit, only health care, which must remain a mostly local service—at least based on current legal stipulations in the U.S., as well as current technological limitations) is eventually affected, as the core logic works its way through the system.
In fact, I'm pretty sure it was for similar reasons that there used to exist some kind of formally defined law that made it illegal to do business with the USSR (back in the day...). It was fully understood back then that any mere commercial entity in the U.S., if it entered into a business relationship with a corresponding entity in the USSR, it was in actuality doing business with the soviet government, which would hopelessly outclass it and crush it, using the financial, legal, and perhaps even military resources that only a government has legal access to. In other words, it would from the start never be a relationship that was in any way proportional, fair, or even competitive.
When the Chinese solar panel industry bankrupted its equivalent in the U.S., it did so not because it was more competitive, but because it was so heavily subsidized by the CCP that it could undercut its competition to the point of literally selling at less than cost, unlike the competition which at bare minimum had to remain in the black (meaning, operating without any profit, which at the very least would turn off investors and lead to stagnant innovation), merely to continue to exist.
Of course you could say it's a good thing they figured out a way to respond in kind to the games the CCP has been playing since the moment they were admitted into the WTO, which never had anything to do with competitive pricing or service provision, as the CCP's heavy handed manipulation was already established as fact ten years ago, after an investigation showed that both Huawei and ZTE had received $30 billion of funds from the central bank. And this doesn't even begin to discuss all the forced tech IP transfers and outright IP theft that took place simultaneously.
When the CCP talks with increasing aggression about invading and subjugating Taiwan, it isn't about any historic claims that exist purely on imagined grounds (how can a significant geographic area with 23 million or so current inhabitants that was at no point in its history under the control of a government, which today has the shameless audacity to describe it as a "breakaway province?" It doesn't even take a child to understand that this claim cannot possibly be true if we interpret the word "province" by its existing definition, i.e. "a territory governed as an administrative or political unit of a country or empire." How can a government that never in its short hundred year history exercised administrative control over a region possibly claim authority over said region on legally defensible grounds? Not that the CCP hasn't already flaunted international law directly and openly, when it dismissed the international court ruling in 2016 regarding the invalidity of using artificially constructed islands in the South China Sea to the most outrageous territorial proclamations—a ruling that was notably based on the same treaty (named the "United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea," or UNCLOS) which the CCP itself had been a signatory to only years prior, insisting instead that the ruling was without merit because it came about due to U.S. influence. I mean, it's a blatantly shameless lie that's the literal equivalent of gaslighting the world and then daring it to step.
No, the reason in significant part is to appropriate the world class semiconductor industry that happens to be based in Taiwan, a country that only happens to share its language but is culturally and ideologically orthogonal to the mainland. Which, by the way, if and when that eventuality ever plays out to their satisfaction, just you wait, because then you'll get a real taste of the concept of throwing one's weight around, son.
So, yeah—stuff like in this article is like a soft glove tap in response to two decades of wanton, egregious, and unilateral abuse, conducted with overtly nefarious intent. That alone was already demonstrated in the 90s, when Clinton OK'd the transfer of sophisticated tooling equipment in exchange for a sizeable order of airplanes from a struggling U.S. defense contractor, on the promise that the tools would not be used for the manufacture of materiel. Admittedly, this was never anything more than a "Gentlemen's Agreement;" but at the very least, it already proved beyond all doubt that when it came to the CCP, there wasn't even one cogent reason to expect gentlemanly conduct.
And yes, I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the CCP, not the Chinese people, who are mere pawns to be used and abused as the CCP sees fit, the same as many small nations and soon the rest of the world, if things continue unabated on current trajectories. Stuff like in this article is really too little too late, but at least better than rolling over, or even grabbing hold of your ankles and saying Uncle.
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