economics is far from a simple competition… things like game theory lead to monopolies being bad for everyone, and that’s what china wants in a lot of cases. the chinese government subsidises some of its industries dramatically so they can take over a global market and then slowly backs off the subsidies when they’ve killed their competition
it’s similar to microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish strategy
though i’m not an american so idk all your 40 whatever it is presidents but all the ones i recognise there are republicans and im pretty sure that if the ones there are real old then well… it’s a totally different party to what it was? it’s not a team - its politics after all; things change