Another analogy/example would be something along these lines: back in the late 90's Microsoft had killed off Netscape by packaging Internet Explorer preinstalled on all Windows Operating systems for free (Netscaped charged $10 per license, later Netscape rebranded into the nonprofit Mozilla) and went on for a long time to enjoy almost 90% marketshare in terms of desktop browser usage. As a result Microsoft got to set the standards for the web and many companies and enterprises built their applications and web services around the IE/Micrsoft centric world. Later on Firefox came unto the scene and started taking marketshare from IE, and at its peak it almost was 30% of the market, but not before Google got wised up and realized instead of propping up Firefox they were better off building their own Chrome browser from scratch. Eventually Chrome started getting traction and adoption and starting taking over the browser landscape and nowadays the situation has reversed and it is Chrome that has nearly 90% marketshare... with IE and Firefox relegated to almost nothing.
So seeing the bigger picture, a while back Microsoft started using the strategy of baking in ad blockers by default on its Edge/IE browsers (this was a couple years ago, before Microsoft finally admitted defeat and threw in the towel and basically used Google's Chromium engine for its new Edge browser replacement) and although this meant it would depress Microsoft's own ad /search revenues (since Bing was heavily being pushed by Microsoft to go against Google search) they figured that if it could hurt Google more than it hurt Microsoft then it was worth it. Namely, Google had like 90% of the entire online ad revenue share, so while adblockers might ding Microsoft's Bing revenue, they figured it would make a much more dissporptionate ding against Google's search king so on the whole it was a net gain that was worth strategic pursuit. Now in retrospect this didn't work because by that time Chrome had already overtaken IE/Edge in terms of marketshare, so Microsoft putting proactive ad blockers on its browsers didn't make much of a different to Google's ad revenue bottom lines...
So back to the real world trade war and other geopolitical and macroeconomic implications at a high level..... In recent years China has overtaken America as the world's largest trading partner. And, at least in 2019, it appeared the trend was accelerating towards the East. Any activity or event, be it natural disaster, or man made climate change, or trade/tariff war, real kinetic fighting war, or even the recent COVID outbreak/epidemic/pandemic/etc can serve as a sort of "inhibitor" that stymies and interrupts that continued growth and progress trends.... in such a case these disruptions and upsets tend to on the whole in aggregation cause a disporportionate amount of loss or damage to the nations, economies and hegemonies that have or are occupying the larger/largest shares of the pie. You know it reminds me of the old agade, that hte more you have, the more you have to lose sort of saying.
It is true that a rich man should not be complaining about having to pay more taxes or even at higher tax margins, and likewise while its great that China made so much progress in the last 45 years since opening up, its now due to its own success ironically in a disadvantageous situation where it has the most exposure, and with a potential to have the most to lose, simply because of the current world structure and dynamics.