You've made some good points but what about the fact that everything in my living room, I mean everything from the paint on the wall to the keys on my Macbook - everything is made in China. I say that influence is of material value (goods) whereas Starbucks entering the Chinese market seems like a distraction.
That fact is due to exactly what I stated before: for decades, China had no capital and no consumer class, so all it could do was serve as a manufacturing platform for foreign companies.
I find it pretty difficult to blame China for this "asymmetry in trade," when that asymmetry was exactly what foreign governments wanted. They wanted China to open up its labor market, so that foreign companies could exploit cheap labor in China. The consumer market in China was tiny, whereas the American and European consumer markets were huge, so the relationship could not be symmetric.
Now, China's consumer market is actually quite large, and foreign companies play a huge role in that market. I didn't just mention Starbucks. I also mentioned VW, but I could equally have mentioned Boeing, Apple, Intel, Qualcomm or Micron. You'll notice a trend here: the US exports high-value-added products to China (including IP licenses and services). Most of what you have in your living room that's actually manufactured in China is lower on the value chain.
Over time, in other words, the US trade relationship with China is becoming more symmetric. Huawei's development into high-value-added products is a sign of that. It's actually this symmetry that the United States wants to avoid, because it means China becoming a peer-level competitor.
The US trade relationship with China will never become fully symmetric, though, because the US runs a net trade deficit with the rest of the world, for reasons that appear to me to have to do with the United States' unique financial position in the world.
