The United States has been imposing tariffs on China in a crazy manner, with President Trump claiming this would bring manufacturing back to America. But can American industries truly break free from "Made in China"?
According to an April 23 report by The New York Times, the U.S. once dominated the global market for personal protective equipment (PPE), now, with the flood of Chinese medical supplies, over 90% of the medical gear used by American healthcare workers is made in China. As one U.S. medical equipment executive bluntly put it: even with a 100 percent tariff, the Chinese masks is still going to be cheaper than the American-made masks.
The report highlights that few American industries have been hit as hard by cheap Chinese imports as manufacturers of masks, exam gloves, and other disposable medical gear. The sector’s decline had led to catastrophic consequences during the COVID-19 pandemic. When China temporarily halted exports, American healthcare workers found themselves defenseless as the deadly airborne virus rapidly filled up emergency rooms and morgues.
Now, with Trump announcing a new round of tariffs this month and China retaliating with an 84% tariff on U.S. imports, the handful of American PPE manufacturers left felt mostly unease.
Lloyd Armbrust, CEO of Armbrust American, a Texas-based N95 mask producer, admitted, "I’m pretty freaked out. On one hand, this is the kind of medicine we need if we really are going to be independent of China. On the other hand, this is not responsible industrial policy."
The U.S. once led the world in PPE, inventing the N95 mask and disposable gloves. Yet today, over 90% of the medical equipment worn by American healthcare staff is produced in China.
During the first year of the pandemic, more than 100 new American medical supply companies sprang up. Five years later, nearly all have vanished. As the pandemic receded, demand for PPE fell. For many Americans, masks became a symbol of government overreach and loss of freedom. Chinese products then returned to the market.
Despite bipartisan vows to end reliance on foreign medical supplies and support the dozens of domestic manufacturers that emerged during the pandemic, federal agencies have reverted to buying inexpensive Chinese imports. Industry experts warn that, with the ongoing measles outbreak, avian flu threats, and the trade war with China, renewed dependence on imported medical products is especially concerning.
According to the American Medical Manufacturers Association, of the 107 companies founded during the pandemic, only five still produce masks and gloves.
Eric Axel, the association’s executive director, says that maintaining high tariffs on Chinese PPE would give U.S. manufacturers an edge: "I think it will change behavior, because people will have to adjust to the reality that you can’t buy below-market price rate stuff from China anymore."
Other industry leaders fear that an escalating U.S.-China trade war could disrupt supply chains and trigger fresh PPE shortages. Tariff policies also breed economic uncertainty, stifling new investment. Scott McGurl, a healthcare industry expert at consulting firm Grant Thornton, notes, "It’s difficult to make business decisions when policies change every four years, and now every couple of days."
Mike Bowen, now-retired but still a shareholder of Prestige Ameritech, one of the few pre-pandemic American mask makers, said the collapse of the U.S. PPE industry in recent years was entirely predictable. He had repeatedly warned Congress about the risks of relying on foreign-made PPE, but no lessons were learned.
Earlier, when California bought millions of N95 masks for residents affected by the Los Angeles wildfires, they chose Chinese products.
Some American medical equipment manufacturers believe that what’s needed now is legislation and policy mandates to push government agencies and hospitals to buy American-made masks and gloves.
Yet, as Armbrust American’s Lloyd Armbrust points out: "Even with a 100% tariff, the Chinese mask that sells for a penny is still going to be cheaper than an American-made mask selling for eight cents."
Deep Throat
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The Japanese yen keeps sliding, and prices across Japan keep climbing. In recent days, a wave of Japanese supermarket shelf photos has swept Chinese social media and shot up the search rankings. The images show shrimp shells, chicken bones and watermelon rinds, the parts usually tossed straight into the trash during everyday cooking, washed, packaged, tagged with prices and neatly displayed, waiting for customers to buy.
Japanese supermarket scraps—shrimp shells, bones, rinds—packaged and priced
Trash Becomes Merchandise: Shrimp Shells and Watermelon Rinds Hit the Shelves
Some netizens exclaimed that in their homes these scraps all go straight into the waste bin, while others questioned whether Japan has grown so poor that it must turn kitchen scraps into cash.
But the causes behind this trend run far deeper than the word 'poor' suggests.
Step inside a local supermarket, and the commercialization of offcuts turns out to be remarkably mature. Watermelon rind is cut into long strips, boxed in cling film and sold at a clearly marked price, while shrimp shells are packaged on their own at 108 yen a box, complete with a recipe card teaching customers how to simmer miso soup. Enoki mushroom stems, radish leaves, napa cabbage ribs, fish tails and other parts mostly discarded outright in China can be found everywhere in the refrigerated compartments.
watermelon rinds
Enoki mushroom stems
Many people's first reaction is to assume the Japanese are simply born thrifty. Dig deeper, and the story changes. This is not a pure culture of thrift; it is a survival choice forced on ordinary people by the yen's collapse and persistently rising prices.
In fact, these offcuts were never entirely without value in Japan's culinary tradition. Shrimp shells can be simmered into soup stock, mushroom stems can be cooked once properly prepared, and watermelon rind can be pickled or stir-fried. Grilled pufferfish (fugu) fins are even one of the ingredients of Japan's distinctive hirezake (fin sake).
Grilled pufferfish fins flavor Japan's fin sake
In the past, making use of these food scraps was mostly a private skill of Japanese housewives. They simmered stock from shrimp shells and fish bones, mixed radish leaves into side dishes, pickled watermelon rind and pan-fried enoki stems. Such practices circulated only within the household.
Japanese netizens: watermelon rinds feed pet insects
Today, supermarkets process, package and sell the offcuts directly. Ordinary people can simply pay for them, sparing themselves the trouble of collecting and preparing the scraps.
Some Japanese netizens explained that watermelon rinds are used to feed pet insects, while shrimp shells go into stock or get mixed into senbei rice crackers, insisting they are absolutely not food waste. They stressed that this is life wisdom that has existed in Japan since ancient times, though not all Japanese people do this.
Japanese netizens: watermelon rinds feed pet insects
The Yen's Collapse Meets a Rain-Soaked Harvest
But there is a more realistic force at work right now, pushing irregular cuts onto store shelves.
Japan itself has scarce arable land and leans heavily on imported food. After the sharp depreciation of the yen, the cost of imported raw materials, energy and logistics rose across the board. Food prices then climbed one after another.
Nothing makes the point more bluntly than the price shock in local supermarket produce sections. Napa cabbage, long the cheapest standby vegetable of winter, now commands more than 1,000 yen for a single whole head, roughly 50 to 60 yuan. Even a quarter of a head costs nearly 300 yen.
Leafy greens such as spinach, komatsuna and lettuce are the hardest hit. A scrawny bunch of spinach, three or four stalks at most, once cost a little over 100 yen. Now it routinely fetches 300 to 400 yen.
Ordinary household income growth cannot keep pace with prices. So people squeeze their dining budgets by every means possible, and these irregular cuts become the substitute of last resort.
Wages lag prices; families slash food budgets
Behind the outrageous vegetable prices sits a pile-up of multiple factors. Weather ranks as one of the key reasons. By one account, Tokyo endured 37 consecutive days of rain after August 27.
September sunshine totaled just 45.8 hours, a low rarely seen for the same period in 38 years. The relentless rain and starved sunlight hurt vegetable growth and supply, sending prices of some leafy greens up rapidly.
On the other side of the ledger, fertilizer, agricultural fuel and logistics costs have all soared, pushing the supply chain cost of agricultural products to historic highs.
More fatally, Japan is confronting a full-spectrum price surge in which everything rises together.
According to data from an authoritative Japanese research institution, more than 3,000 kinds of everyday foods and beverages in Japan announced price increases on October 1 this year alone. The list spans bottled beverages, beer, milk and other everyday drinks. It also covers ham, bacon, frozen foods and other processed items, plus seasonings such as soy sauce, mayonnaise and soup stock cubes. Even public service fees like electricity, gas and postal delivery are climbing.
20,000 Price Hikes, Shrinking Paychecks
Price hikes are not just an October story. Teikoku Databank's count at the time put confirmed food price increases for all of 2026 at 20,187 items, the second straight year above 20,000. September and October alone saw more than 8,000 items go up.
Consumers are not dealing with a single supermarket suddenly jacking up prices. They are watching a widening lineup of everyday goods reprice, nonstop. What fills ordinary Japanese people with despair is not that prices are rising. It is that only prices are rising.
Rising prices have transformed Japanese supermarket habits
The Government of Japan keeps urging companies to pay workers more. The problem: the sliver of nominal wage growth gets devoured, instantly, by inflation running above three percent.
Numbers from the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) show that after adjusting for price changes, Japan's real wages have posted dozens of consecutive months of negative growth. Translation: the figure on the pay slip looks bigger, but it buys less and less.
Relentless inflation has rewired how Japan shops. Housewives once raced the clock in the evening to grab half-price bento and near-expiry food. Now, waiting for discount windows to shop has become a mainstream way to consume.
Shoppers no longer buy a whole napa cabbage or a whole fish. They buy a quarter of a cabbage, or fish tails and bones, as needed. For an equally savory soup base, fish bones cost far less than a solid fillet.
Even picking habits have flipped. The old move was to reach deep into the shelf for the freshest expiration dates. Now plenty of shoppers deliberately choose the near-expiry items up front, just to snag the discount.
Bento has gone minimalist as well. The chase for polish and pizzazz is over. Many people now make their lunch boxes straight from refrigerator leftovers, prioritizing the clearing out of ingredients at home.
Campaigns against food waste have been preached for years. But the real force changing habits is prices that refuse to come down. Thrift has shifted from a virtue to a choice ordinary families are compelled to make.
The Real Difference: China's Supply Chain and the Limits of Comparison
Watching all this, many netizens start to wonder whether they themselves are too wasteful in everyday life. The truth is, no such comparison is needed.
Chinese supermarkets do not sell shrimp shells or watermelon rinds. The reason is not that Chinese people fail to understand thrift. The reason is that the country possesses a powerful agricultural supply chain.
The Vegetable Basket Project, greenhouse farming and a developed cold-chain transport system keep domestic vegetable supply abundant and ingredient prices affordable. That ample, stable supply is exactly what shaped today's consumption habits.
Thrift is always worth advocating. But we must also see clearly the differences in national conditions behind it.
Under high prices, every bit of grocery money ordinary people spend hides real life pressure. It is the hesitation when the wallet opens each day. It is the sigh at a napa cabbage priced at 1,000 Japanese yen. And it is the daily reality of having to learn to boil a whole pot of soup from shrimp shells.
Every grocery purchase carries real cost-of-living pressure
