China's government has no particular need to be responsive to its people, and its history as a nation state dwarfs ours. In that sense, China has a much longer rope than the U.S. government does.
That said, China's growth has been stalling lately. That two or three decades of incredible growth has been coming to an end for at least the last half decade, and there's no obvious way for the Chinese government to fix it. Add to that the U.S. needs China as a trading partner way less than China needs the U.S. as a trading partner, so "we" definitely have a trade advantage in a trade war.
Overall, I think the balance leans heavily toward the U.S. in a trade war. The bigger question is why? At the end of said trade war, one likely outcome is that China has rewired its economy to place less of a need on trade with the U.S., which means that the U.S. has lost a great deal of leverage over China, i.e., the U.S. does not have as strong a position to constrain China's expansionism. Countries that rely on each other for their economic strength rarely go to war with each other. Countries that are fighting each other economically are much more likely to go to a shooting war with each other.
On the one hand that could be seen as overthinking it; on the other, it could lead to a stronger position for China, particularly in the Pacific and Asian theaters. No one here knows the long term outcome, but there are more factors than simply do we have a stronger position than China in the current trade war.? All that said, I have zero influence on it, so I'll just sit back and watch out how it spooles out, and hope that my kid doesn't end up fighting in Korea, Taiwan, southeast Asia, or Japan (to be fair, as of now I'm not overly worried about that).
