Also, in a petroleum-based economy, there's the question of how fast we can pump oil out of the ground when 1.4 billion Chinese suddenly want as much of it as we do. This is offset by increases in efficiency every time the price goes up, and reduced efficiency every time the price goes down (SUVs).
Until recently China's economy was mostly coal-based, just because they have a lot of it (I don't know if that's still true). They were still using steam locomotives just because they burn coal instead of oil. I don't know about India. We also have a lot of coal, but we have a bad history with coal miners' unions (apparently they don't like getting killed on the job).
But conventional free trade measures won't help us either. New ideas are in short supply.
The idea of limiting imports to the amount of exports is not traditional protectionism, because it doesn't target specific products. The problem is that it doesn't guarantee that we'll have anything to export. But it might limit or slow down the damage-- ie, if we're going to get hit, we might at least soften the blow, until someone comes up with a better idea.
It reminds me of the "opium wars", when England was smuggling opium into China to balance their tea imports. The problem was that England didn't have any legal products that China wanted to import (but you can always create a market for drugs). The other option for England would have been to stop importing tea from China (which they eventually did, after they learned how to grow it in India).
Certain Central American countries are doing the same thing to us with Cocaine, and it's keeping their economies alive. Winning the "drug war" would mean bankrupting several other countries. BTW some people claim that this wouldn't work if only poor people used cocaine, because there wouldn't be enough cash flow.