Calgary-born David Ramsden-Wood is a Colorado-based chemical engineer, with MBAs from both Queen’s and Cornell universitiesLike a train wreck, it’s hard to take your eyes off the total carnage in the markets. I was planning to follow up on the Chauvin/Garcia trade-offs, but that idea got sidelined the moment the market reversed 6% in under an hour on the China tariff news.These new tariffs aren’t just economic policy — they’re the other side of the coin we’ve been discussing in recent posts. Yes, they’re about making America build stuff again. But they’re also about winning a war with China — without firing a single bullet. If it works, it doesn’t just level the playing field. It sets China back 30 years and preserves American economic dominance. Which means low interest rates..At midnight, in about 35 minutes as I write this, Trump’s retaliatory tariffs go on China at 104% and the gloves are off. Trump’s objective is clear: destroy the Chinese economy within three years, or cripple it so severely that the Communist Party collapses under its own weight.Think the USSR. Except this time, we aren’t using tanks, planes, or alliances. We are using economic warfare: tariffs — blunt, brutal and absolute.For decades, China grew rich by flooding foreign markets with subsidized overproduction — steel, solar, electronics, batteries, everything. The strategy worked because the West let it happen.Wall Street profited. The WTO shrugged. Politicians clapped for “low prices” as entire domestic industries were gutted. This is an epic clip from the White House today..Trump has now slammed the door shut. A 104% tariff doesn’t tweak prices — it breaks their business model. Inflation models can be built and speculated on but this is economic war and Trump doesn’t care. He is building a wall so high that Chinese goods are effectively shut out of the U.S. market.Right now, China has only three responses. All of them are poison.First, they could capitulate. Stop the subsidies. Float the yuan. Open their markets. Protect IP. In other words: surrender. But that’s impossible. The CCP governs through control. If they give up economic command, they lose the ability to steer the system — and probably lose the country with it.Second, they could print money. Launch massive domestic stimulus. Flood the system with credit to offset lost exports. But they’ve already tried. And it’s failing. Local governments are suffocating under debt. Developers like Evergrande have defaulted on hundreds of billions in obligations. Entire sectors — especially real estate — are zombified. Print too much now, and the yuan collapses, capital flees and confidence shatters.Third, they could try to find new customers. Replace U.S. demand with the EU, India, Japan, South Korea. But even this is slipping away. Germany is waking up to the threat of Chinese green tech wiping out its last industrial edge. India’s “Make in India” campaign is a nationalist firewall.And Japan and South Korea have no interest in letting Beijing dominate the Pacific economy. .If Trump pulls just a few of these allies into alignment by Easter (ten more days to slow the spread,) China is out of options. No export surplus. No way to fund internal subsidies. No growth engine left. And here’s where it gets dangerous — not just economically, but socially.China’s youth unemployment rate now unofficially exceeds 25%. The government stopped publishing the data in mid-2023, because the numbers were too damning. Entire generations of college graduates are stuck at home, jobless, directionless, and increasingly disillusioned.Worse, the demographic clock is ticking. China’s population is shrinking faster than any major country in modern history. They passed their peak in 2022. By 2050, they’ll lose over 100 million people. The working-age population is collapsing. The median age is rising.There are entire cities — tens of them — built for millions, now sitting empty.Kangbashi, in Inner Mongolia, was built to house a million people. It holds a fraction of that.Tianducheng, near Hangzhou, was designed to mimic Paris — complete with Eiffel Tower replica — and is now mostly vacant.Across the country, real estate is 20–30% of GDP when you include construction, land sales, and housing services. But the bubble has popped, and these ghost cities aren’t filling up. .And then there's the gender bomb.Thanks to decades of the One-Child Policy and sex-selective abortions, China has an estimated 35 million more men than women. That’s tens of millions of young, unmarried men who will never have families, wives, or children. No stake in the system. No hope of traditional fulfillment. Just anger, nationalism, and idle time. The sex doll business is seriously booming over there (not kidding.)The CCP knows this is dangerous. Historically, surplus male populations drive violence, war and instability. And that pressure cooker is now coupled with unemployment, demographic collapse, and international isolation. None of this is theoretical. It’s real. And for the first time in decades, the United States is actively accelerating the breakdown. .Back in the USSRBack in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union hit a similar wall. Its economy was brittle, over-leveraged and failing to deliver. At the same time, global capital flows were shifting. The first cracks of what would become the Asian currency crisis were forming. The world was waking up to the limits of central planning, debt-fuelled illusions, and state-directed inefficiency.Ultimately, the USSR couldn’t purge its leverage. And when oil collapsed, it had nothing left to stand on. There had to be a purge of liquidity and leverage out of the system. The law of diminishing returns comes for us all (to quote my good friend Mark Rossano).That was true in 1989. And it is true again, right now.China’s model was always unsustainable. It only worked in a world of zero interest rates, unquestioned access to Western markets, and political protection from Davos-class enablers.Trump just broke that world. WHO. WTO. NGOs. WEF. All of it. And unless China reforms — which it won’t — or collapses, which is now increasingly likely, this is how the Cold War ends. Not with a bang. Not with a bomb. But with a tariff, a currency spiral, and 35 million angry young men with nothing left to lose.Calgary-born David Ramsden-Wood is a Colorado-based chemical engineer with MBAs from both Queen’s and Cornell. Reprinted with permission, he published this first on his SubStack on April 9.