A “Make American Strong Again” banner hangs on the wall as rows upon rows of overweight workers assemble Nike sneakers; one lifts a burger up to his mouth as he eats while working, another rests his head on the sewing machine in front of him, barely able to keep his eyes open.
It’s a caricature of U.S. manufacturing that Chinese netizens have been laughing at over the past week, as social media platforms have seen a wave of AI-generated videos portraying what some think it would look like for Americans to work in sweatshop-like textile factories and iPhone assembly lines more commonly associated with China.
As U.S. President Donald Trump escalates a trade war with China that he began in his first term—seeing tariffs, which are taxes on imports, as a path to restore a U.S. manufacturing sector that has steadily declined over decades—China’s government has made its opposition clear: After Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, when he hiked tariffs on all global trade partners, Chinese state media produced AI-generated parody videos slamming Trump’s approach as costly, divisive, and dangerous. After Trump announced a 90-day pause for other countries but further hiked tariffs on China, which now stand at 145%, China’s finance ministry raised its retaliatory tariff on U.S. goods to 125% but said that it wouldn’t continue to respond with tit-for-tat increases, arguing that doing so amounts to nothing more than a “numbers game” as the current rate already makes imports from the U.S. prohibitively expensive.
“It would be a joke,” the ministry said, promising other unspecified countermeasures if its interests continue to be infringed.
But while a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies is certainly not funny for Beijing, the AI-generated videos gone viral among Chinese social media users satirizing fictitious American manufacturing workers do get at a more serious truth.
“The joke is Americans don’t want to do those jobs,” Mark Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japan’s Kansai Gaidai University and a U.S. national, tells TIME. “We’re the punchline.”
The economic reality
Trump has promised that his tariffs will usher in a “new golden age” for American workers, harkening back to an industrial past that has been lost to decades of globalization. The logic goes that by raising the price of foreign goods, businesses and consumers will be discouraged from importing and instead invest in U.S.-based manufacturing and American-made goods. But the irony, economists say, is that the trade deficits that he seeks to reverse are a sign of the U.S. economy’s relative dominance, not weakness.
“The U.S. is at a state of development where it has moved beyond manufacturing,” Jayant Menon, a research fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, previously told TIME. “This is what manufacturing countries are trying to aspire to, and this guy is trying to go the other way.”
Read More: How Trump’s Tariffs Could Lead to a Global Recession
What is more likely to happen, economists have said, is that as the relatively cheap goods that Americans are accustomed to being able to buy dramatically rise in price, consumers will simply buy fewer things. And greater U.S.-based manufacturing wouldn’t necessarily result in lower prices because it would still involve higher costs—for many overseas manufacturers, paying the tariff would still be less costly than relocating to the U.S.
The biggest reasons why China and not the U.S. has come to be the world’s “sole manufacturing superpower,” or “the world’s factory,” are its greater labor supply and thus lower wages, more efficient domestic business and supply chain ecosystem, and relatively lax regulatory environment. Tariffs alone won’t change these underlying factors for the U.S.
“If you think about producing a laptop in China versus the U.S.,” says Yuan Mei, assistant professor in the School of Economics at Singapore Management University, “in China a lot of parts and components of the laptop are produced within China, so shipping those components within the country is pretty cheap.” Many other components, like chips, are produced in other Asian nations, like Japan and South Korea, which also means relatively cheaper shipping to China than to the U.S.
But the mismatch between America’s workforce and China’s is perhaps the biggest obstacle to shifting a significant amount of manufacturing from China to the U.S. In the U.S., as of March 2025, just under 13 million workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, while just over 7 million Americans are unemployed. China’s manufacturing sector, meanwhile, employs more than 100 million people, while high unemployment and low regulations suppress wages and labor conditions.
While many Americans—80% of respondents to a CATO Institute survey—agree in principle with the idea that the U.S. would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing, far fewer would actually want to take such a job themself: only 25% of the CATO survey’s respondents said they believed they would be better off in a manufacturing job.
Moreover, economists have noted that much of the manufacturing work that could be transplanted to the U.S. may actually be more efficiently automated, or done by machines instead of humans, while many of the jobs that would be needed may require skills that the U.S. is short on.
The manufacturing sector relies heavily on engineers, Mei says, and engineering is among China’s most popular college majors. In the U.S., on the other hand, a large proportion of engineering and tech talent is international students—and with the Trump Administration’s crackdowns on immigrants and international students, there might eventually be, Mei says, a “gap in the supply” of engineers that the U.S. needs to boost its domestic manufacturing.
From mocking to hawking
Mei tells TIME he noticed the memes of American factory workers started to spread in recent weeks amid the escalating U.S.-China trade war, when Chinese social media users began wondering what American products may become more expensive due to Chinese retaliatory tariffs. That morphed into conversations about the difference between a brand being American, of which there are many cases, and its manufacturing being U.S.-based, which is much rarer.
“Many netizens realized that there are few examples of daily products that are produced in the U.S.,” says Mei, noting the exceptions of very expensive high tech instruments, aircraft, and pharmaceutical products.
Rather, the U.S.’s comparative advantage is in the services sector, Mei says. “Think Silicon Valley.” (Observers believe Beijing will next turn its sights to U.S. services exports, targeting American professional, legal, technological, telecommunications, education, health, entertainment, and other services, many of which have already been scrutinized and restricted, to exert pressure amid the trade war.)
The AI-generated videos depicting Americans taking factory jobs, says Ashley Dudarenok, who runs a China and Hong Kong-based consumer research consultancy, relied on subverting a “long-standing stereotype about global labor dynamics.” And quickly, she tells TIME, the caricature was “absolutely everywhere, and it’s still trending.”
“There was the trade war, there was the tariff war, and now there is the meme war,” Dudarenok says.
Even among the Chinese workforce, more and more aspire to work in sectors other than manufacturing. Dudarenok says across Chinese social media she’s seen comments saying, “Chinese people don’t want to do these jobs, why would Americans want to do these jobs?” or “Chinese manufacturers are moving into Vietnam, into Africa—now we have another option: America.”
Still, the tariffs are no joke to those in China whose livelihoods depend on manufacturing goods for export. Some have also taken to social media to respond to the tariffs: by explaining how cheaply they actually manufacture goods and how much of the price consumers paid pre-tariffs came from brand markups.
Some have even appealed to Americans to buy directly from them. “They want to get rid of the middleman,” says Mei. But consumers should beware that claiming to manufacture for big brands while actually producing knock-offs is a common scam, and some scammers could be exploiting consumer panic about potential price hikes. While China produces more than half of the world’s clothing and textiles, Dudarenok says manufacturers that are “trusted partners” with big brands don’t typically sell their partners out so easily.
Read More: How Trump’s Trade War Could Boost Slow Fashion
A messaging win for Beijing
If social media sentiment is anything to go off of, Mei says that there’s a lot of support among Chinese citizens for the government’s policy decisions related to Trump’s trade war. “It’s seen as a good thing that they are imposing retaliatory tariffs. A small share of Chinese netizens are still worried, and say that maybe we should just yield to the U.S., but the majority agree with the stance of the Chinese government.”
The government’s message is clear, Dudarenok says: “China is prepared to fight for its right to be in the room and to be at the table.”
Mei has even seen memes depicting China protecting other countries from U.S. bullying or suggesting China is the one country brave enough to stand up for itself.
But the sentiment isn’t just popular on Chinese social media. Reshares of posts popular on Chinese social media to X and TikTok, which are blocked within mainland China though still accessed by many users via VPNs, have garnered millions of views and tens of thousands of likes. Although it’s not clear who is generating and sharing the original videos, Cogan, the peace and conflict studies professor in Japan, says it’s nevertheless a “huge win for China.”
“I think that the Chinese understand quite well the fact that American society is quite divided, and at this particular stage of our political polarization, Americans really don’t care whose propaganda they are spreading or where the meme actually comes from—so they’re willing to spread whatever … as long as it furthers their own political messaging.”
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