By far the biggest ‘export’ that leaves Long Beach bound to China last you year, was, well nothing. 2020 was a tumultuous year for logistics. Numbers for Americas largest pacific port were no exception. A total of 3,998,340 TEUs arrived, while 1,475,888 TEUs set sail towards the middle kingdom.
In other words just 37% of all containers going to China had something in them. The others were as useful as returning your empty bottles to the recycling station.
Farmers still can’t get their American grown stuff over to the other side. It seems that it is not worth the wait for the food exports to be put into the (large) cans. It appears to be more lucrative to send the empty boxes back asap.
In the same time the Trump administration directed government agencies to minimize procurements from China yesterday. It is the chips in things that makes them nervous. My guess is that a certain level of the administration has been working on things like this for a while, planning to put them into action in the usual orchestrated fashion. But they rather dump them into the public sphere now then to hand them over.