This is the US goal, to coerce its vassals to stick to it, to turn away from China and the Chinese market especially as it pertains to anything hi-tech, thereby depriving China of the world market, meaning to make China's tech ascension and tech independence that much harder if not even impossible, and thereby as a consequence with the larger end goal of capping China developmentally to deprive it the ability to get out of the low income trap, so to speak....
Between getting EU/UK other nations to capitulate on the 5G stance, getting Phillipines to do reverse 180 on the VFA thing, and now forcing bytedance to sell TikTok to US companies etc it does seem the strategy is to capitalize on US leads/strength and hegemony in order to create the sort of dynamic that isolates China and surrounds China with enemies and adversities so that it cannot continue up the normal trajectory of eventually outgrowing America...
So at some point the calculus in Beijing will still need to change from one of "bid time" (minimal to no retaliation) to one of making strategic moves against the US directly as well... So far China has done very little to nothing in response, but as it becomes increasingly more clear that the US is not going to relent, and that at some point in this curve that doing nothing will be far more harmful than China striking back, then China would be wise to the whatever maximizes its success or minimizes/mitigates the harm inflected upon it by US and US vassals...
To use the game of Go as analogy, maybe (to give the opponent benefit of doubt) the US does have the upper hand, and that US is like AlphaGo and China is running a version of lesser Go AI, so in the end US might still win out in the long run anyway, but the difference would be if China always avoid a fight be it locally or globally it will incentivize the opponent to be more and more greedy and win by many more points than it otherwise would have gotten away with from...
China should do whatever it needs to maximize
