If this makes you feel better, Chinese are buying stuffs from many other Asian countries (most of them are US allies), assembling those stuffs together and selling the finished products to US. In a way, the large trade deficit with China is simply a repackaging of the large trade deficit that US used to have with other Asian countries. Now the trade deficit takes a detour to China and get re-labeled as a trade deficit with China.
China has very little natural resource other than human resource. If China needs to sell something, China needs to import it from foreign countries in a form of raw materials or partially finished components. That is the reason China has trade deficits with the rest of the Asian countries (particularly Japan). In the end, China has a small surplus; this is not like China is rolling in money. Please bear in mind that China sells a lot of stuff to US, but US also sells a lot of stuffs (like military equipments) to Asian countries, and those Asian countries sells a lot of stuffs to China. This is like a loop. Therefore, we cannot simply look at the trade balance with China in isolation. We need to look at the big picture.
If US wants to improve its overall trade balance, US needs to sell more stuff to the rest of the world. US has plenty of raw materials that can sell -- start by opening more oil fields in Alaska. This is a question of whether US (government and people) has the will to do this.
The other way is to cut the defense budget or downsize the government, and channel the money (in the form of tax saving) to private sectors in order to increase the capital investment on US industrials. This is to improve the productivity of US industrials. Honestly, I don't know if this will work though (US companies could send the money aboard and opened a state of the art factory in China); therefore, I don't say anything more on this.
There are other things that US can do well and could have sold well. High tech military equipments are things that US is doing very well and could have sold well. Afterall, US has spent so much money developing those weapons. But for one reason or another, US cannot simply sell these high tech stuffs to any country discriminably. This means US has very great stuffs that US could have sold but cannot sell.
In other words, there are many great stuffs that US could have sold, but cannot sell for some reasons. This will go a long way explaining why US has a large trade deficit.
If US doesn't want to sell more stuffs to the world, US will need to find a way to buy fewer stuffs from the rest of the world either voluntarily or being forced on. Seem like if the budget deficit keeps increasing like this, US currency may drop its value. IF this happened, we would not afford to buy that many stuffs from the rest of the world, and the trade deficit would be taken care of in this way. Oh well...
Jay Chan