Actually it's hard to speculate on what the prices would be after such a "dumping". Of course China's not stupid enough to commit such a mass sell-off and devalue their own assets which is why they've practiced gradual and limited sell-offs in the past. They earn China interest so why sell them. If the theory with the "dumpers" is that such a move will create volatility and result in some sort of economic destruction of the US, of course they would be wrong there. However even if the US were to buy them back, it would reasonably take quite some time for them to do that. The whole premise of China using this as some sort of weapon seems a bit like wishful thinking to me. Of course I don't really know much about economics but the real economic weapons China hold are clear and self-evident but too often ignored.
China needs to save its manufacturing and continue to convince most of the world to do its manufacturing there. Not so much for learning different foreign commercial technologies nowadays since most of that's been thoroughly completed years if not decades ago. High tech fields seldom involve China in the slightest (I can think of three). If most of the world is to move their manufacturing out of China, and this is only one economic driving force behind China's, then China will be faced with even greater pressure to create new industries and go further into services and technology. At this moment, there's little reason to believe China will not come out from that cycle becoming relatively competitive and cutting out chunks of the pie for itself. At the moment it appears China wants to have their cake and eat it too, by holding onto manufacturing while they continue to compete and develop in the high end fields which will create future industries. It will only slow the process down if China is to lose manufacturing so soon while the average Chinese citizen's overall living standards and productivity still fall well short of OECD. Goes to show why they're fighting so hard in retaliation of US efforts to cut off that cash cow. I think the US leaders may have believed Chinese leaders feel they are ready to let go of some of those economic drivers in exchange for less aggressive confrontation so early in China's rise.
