Not at all. We were light years ahead of China economically until Mao really made China actually become China in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the USSRs help (until the late 1950s with Khrushchev giving up on them and Stalin’s Communism).
When China then moved all in from agrarian to manufacturing in the 1950s, the US had become a late-stage manufacturing economy after almost 100 years of industrialization. China of course would catch up with a seemingly unending amount of natural resources, slave labor and a totalitarian run country and economy.
By the time Nixon went to China this was in full swing, and the US was rapidly maturing into a service based economy. This also coincides with businesses in the US being deregulated, shareholders running corporations demanding profits and labor costs going through the roof with wage and benefit costs and the advent of robotics, technology and other economies now coming online with consumer demand.
A service based economy like the US is a mature economy with a far higher standard of living in general than a manufacturing based one. This is part of the progression in the 20th and 21st centuries.
As was said elsewhere:
How is it the Top 10 highest standard of living counties in the world are not at all known for manufacturing in almost any sense?
In order: Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Oman, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, Austria, Norway and Sweden.
Most of them import (like the US) a ton of goods and have a strong service economy for the most part.
The manufacturing jobs you speak of are not coming back on any large scale as this is not China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Bangladesh, or Mexico. When some jobs are created down the road, they will be automated with robotics and AI far beyond what they are now and the labor component will be minimal.
This fascination with “fixing” the trade imbalances by becoming a production-sided economy once again is a fool’s errand.