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If the goal is greater total manufacturing output than China, yeah, that's pretty much impossible without a collapse of Chinese industry that we have no reason to think is coming. There's no reason that should be the goal for anyone but total cranks. Right now, China represents 29% of the world's industrial output while the US is 17%. With about four times the population, China doesn't even double US output. And that's just total population. China's manufacturing workforce is over 100 million. The US's is about 13 million. That means that the average US manufacturing laborer is achieving five times the industrial output of the average Chinese manufacturing laborer. The US may be 50 years into a general industrial decline, but it's falling from a peak of truly outrageous productivity and most industries have massively improved operational efficiency, offsetting a large portion of the labor base collapse. And obviously, the US is more capable of pursuing an autarkic economy than any country on earth given its staggering agricultural output and essentially infinite raw resources.

It's not hard to imagine how industrial policy even half as effective as China's would meaningfully shrink the manufacturing output gap. If we just returned to the light social democratic policies of the US midcentury, there could be a truly competitive industrial rivalry between the US and China. If you could implement a Chinese-style DOTP in the US today, the US would probably have significant advantages over the PRC.

Of course, the most important thing here is that these are not separate, competing industrial spheres but two closely interlinked and interdependent parts of the same system. US manufacturing is extremely dependent on Chinese inputs at all levels of the supply chain except basic industrial metals. China still relies on the US for a lot of the highest end technology, where the maturity of American tech and industry provides the extremely advanced inputs the PRC hasn't yet eclipsed the US in. 20 years ago, the dependency balance was far more in the US's favor, which has obviously flipped, but it's also not a one-way relationship.

So what would reindustrialization in the US actually look like? It would necessitate the defeat of neoliberalism either by revitalized social democracy or a proper DOTP, but either way it would be a mutual industrial dialectic, where each state works to build the capacity of the other in a friendly rivarly/cooperative competition, understanding that each country's individual success is boosted by and boosts in turn the other's. Cheap Chinese renewables would form the basis for a mass growth in American electrification. Chinese industrial capital would set up shop all over the US, ideally focusing in the areas most heavily damaged by deindustrialization (the rust belt). You'd see an inverse of the technology sharing that China got from the US during its industrialization, with Chinese industrial tech being replicated on US shores by US-Chinese company partnerships. You'd need to make major infrastructural improvements, especially in public transportation, in order to close the gap of unemployed workers and an explosion of open industrial jobs. Chinese expertise and industrial might could drive that. Chinese workers would need to fill many skill gaps in the US workforce while American education rights itself.

You'd end up with an extremely tightly-integrated cross-Pacific industry of staggering technical complexity and productive capacity. This would be the surest path to a lasting and mutually beneficial peace between the two countries. If the US working class were to carry out a revolution and establish a DOTP, this incredibly powerful industrial engine could become a global force for peace driven by each nation's central planning authorities recognizing their joint interest in further expanding that beyond their own borders - imagine a Belt and Road and Burger Initiative, where both countries cooperate to build the infrastructur and industrial base of the global south to create more partners for export and import.

So basically, US reindustrialization is necessary on the path to global peace and communism.