I don’t see it that way. Just the opposite, in fact. The real world situation is that we are taking their goodies, and giving them paper dollars. Now a paper dollar in the hand of a Chinaman is really an IOU, a right to buy American stuff. So if they just keep all that money buried underground for the next thousand years, that means they will never take anything in exchange for all the stuff they already gave us. So we got it for free. Great for us, bad for them.
If they do show up here with a big wad of bills, we may be in trouble. Because we don’t have anything to give them, no plasma TVs etc, because they make that stuff themselves, they don’t need ours. Besides, we have stopped making stuff, to a large extent. The only thing they could want to buy with their trillions of dollars is OWNERSHIP OF ALL OUR COMPANIES. They just go the stock exchanges and buy up Microsoft and everything else.
Now I suspect you may be thinking “If all those trillions are buried underground in China, won’t our USA economy be missing something? Isn’t all that money the Chinese have buried needed to invest and make the country grow?” The answer is “Of course not.” The lazy version of the answer is “There’s plenty more where that come from.” All we have to do is print more and more paper money, as much as we need.
But that’s not the real answer. Printing more money is ALWAYS bad. No matter what. if the Chinese bury their dollars underground, or burn it, we won’t be missing anything at all. This is the unlazy answer. I have to be unlazy and type up the words “Read What Has Govt Done to Our Money, by Rothbard, Chapter 10 and 11.” You have to be unlazy and download the book for free from this site and read those chapters.
I’m no expert, but I think they are lending the dollars right back to the US govt. It’s called buying Treasury Bills. Here once again, they are being really foolish, because they will NEVER get that money back. We can’t afford to repay them by any means.