The first time I set foot in Hickory, a small city at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, the area’s beauty hid its sorrow. Forests rich in oak, maple and pine have given birth to dozens of furniture companies that employ thousands of workers. Hickory’s factories craft the kind of heavy, solid American furniture that is meant to last generations. But everything changed in 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization. The surge in Chinese imports devastated Hickory and other small factory towns like it.
President Trump has held up these towns as a symbol of all that’s gone wrong with the American economy. His attacks on globalization and on China, in particular, resonate with voters and power his “America first” agenda. The president has sought to restore American manufacturing by imposing sky-high tariffs and empowering an aggressive deportation force. But if you spend any time in Hickory, you can see how counterproductive these policies are.
The town is making a comeback. The jobs are returning, and incomes are rising. But the reasons have nothing to do with Mr. Trump and his signature policies.
In my early visits to Hickory, in 2016 and 2019, the pain from Chinese competition was evident. Workers recounted enduring layoff after layoff. Taking a drive, they would point to the shuttered buildings and abandoned lots where they had once worked. The owners of the furniture factories sheepishly admitted how naïve they were to think they could make more money by producing goods in China and importing them. Too late, they realized they had turned their Chinese suppliers into competitors who sold to U.S. retailers at prices they couldn’t match.
Hickory’s economic woes began in 2001 when U.S. manufacturers shifted production to low-wage Chinese factories. Between that moment and 2012, Chinese imports nearly tripled as a percentage of America’s economic output, which translated into a loss of about 2.4 million jobs. The import wave swept across the country but crashed hardest into smaller cities in the Southeast and Midwest that depended on one or two industries and had relatively few college-educated residents.
