Not simply that the West bought more. China refused to accept anything except silver and gold in payment for their Tea. There is only so much silver and gold so they looked for something else they could trade for and found that there was a demand for Opium. Of course this isn't mentioned much when you read about the period when you are in China.
When living in Hong Kong in the years running up to the handover in 97 the Chinese government used the Opium Wars as an excuse to accuse the British of all sorts of bizzare things during the negotiations. My favorite was calling the governor Chris Patten the "son of a running dog" which has a bit more bite in Chinese. A lot of the knashing of teeth on the Chinese side of the table was repeatedly justified by the dastardly deeds of the British in the Opium Wars to a country that was then still under the rule of an Emperor, which later turned into a corrupt republic and then overthrown again by the Communists and now seems to have been overthrown by the combined forces of Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Channel.
> The West buys more from China than China buys from The West
because there are long list of high tech & military stuff that China is simply not allowed to buy. it is so bad to the extent that Chinese are not allowed to buy Intel Phi processors which many of your local computer shops allow you to make orders.
Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters, missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, satellites etc. On the non-military side, how about super computers, space techs, laser, semiconductor techs, optical fiber, high end composite materials. EU has very similar laws & policies, nothing really different from the US.
> Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters
China's interested in buying precisely one round of each thing. And thereafter replacing it with their own. That's not a criticism, it's a fact of life in dealing with China. They have zero interest in being dependent on any outside nation more than absolutely necessary.
The things you list, wouldn't even remotely dent the trade deficits China rings up. You're talking about $5 to $6 trillion per decade with the US and EU combined.
Intel processors et al. are not going to fix that. There's absolutely nothing that can plug a $600 billion per year hole with China (US+EU), realistically. Energy exports (in the case of the US) is the only thing that could dent it. The solution is to move more manufacturing away from China and rebalance that large concentrated deficit with other nations in a distributed manner, and to make more things domestically. That will happen naturally as China's wages & costs continue to rise.
True story: In the late '50s and '60s, the Parker pen company had a manufacturing operation in China, making the Parker "51", a rather singular design. At some point, it was abandoned by Parker and closed down.
Sometime later, a Chinese company named Hero took over the plant and machinery and started making their own pens, including knock-offs of the "51" such as the Hero 616 and 100, and leading to a fair sized industry of Chinese fountain pens, many of which are very cheap to purchase apparently due to export subsidies by the Chinese government.
Hopefully that colours the decisions made to rebalance the trade system.