I’m talking about the West’s (NATO) dependance on China for manufactured goods.
Remember early during Covid there was talk about the Wuhan Flu or China Virus? China responded with a threat to cut off PPE supplies. The US quickly made amends because medical supplies are vital. Our health care would crumble without it.
Look around, is there much of anything in your home that didn’t get made in China? Dog food, sheet rock, your light fixtures, appliances. All made in China.
I watch professional Auto repair on YouTube. Where do the replacement parts come from? Yup, it’s China. It’s stamped on the boxes.
We get some things from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore etc. How long would that Trade last if China flexed its military power in that region?
I have a bad feeling a lot of components in our military supply chain come from China. Could we keep our planes flying? How about our military electronics? Even our uniforms and MRE’s probably come from China.
We didn’t make this mistake with Russia during the Cold War. Trade was limited and we still had our manufacturing facilities.
How did we blunder into this dependence? Is NATO already screwed?
Errr…there is a big difference between NATO and the West.
But there are plenty of other manufacturing, more Western-friendly nations who could do everything for the West that China does.
Anything China makes now could be made by Vietnam, Indonesia, etc., and they’d be friendlier about it. If China tried to stamp down on them, the West could stamp back harder.
China has some advantages over NATO. Recognizing the importance of manufacturing and productivity as being strategically essential is just one of them.
Sure, but the vast majority of things that China makes for the West/NATO are things that are cheap and easily made by the West itself - albeit with a lot of reluctance and higher prices if need be. Not many Americans or Europeans these days, for instance, want to work on an assembly line for teddy bears.
Relatively few critical, high-tech, invaluable stuff is made by China for the West; in fact I can’t really think of any. Semiconductors are largely made by the USA itself, Taiwan and South Korea. Extreme ultraviolet lithography comes from the Netherlands. Does China make any particularly advanced medical stuff that Western medicine depends on? There are rare earths, yes, but those can be found elsewhere, it’s just that America doesn’t want to endure the horrific pollution of mining it.
I think this is the key part. There isn’t much that China produces that the US or some other major western country couldn’t produce, if they decided to spend the money to do it. It would make things more expensive, and thus probably depress civilian commercial usage, but in the scenario where China tries to have a military impact on the west via denying access to Chinese manufacturing, that wouldn’t matter. It’s a cliche, but cost really doesn’t matter that much when it comes to war - if uniforms are 10 times more expensive, you suck it up and do it - there’s a war on, after all!
Chinese rare-earths are found in American missile components, but again, the West could do the rare-earth stuff itself (although it would take a while.) MREs are made in California and Florida, if I’m not mistaken, so that’s not an issue. I Googled and apparently some American military uniforms are made in the Dominican Republic, which was a surprise, but at least not Chinese.
But overall, you are right about the U.S. military depending too much on foreign nations. Here’s a link.
Vietnam and Indonesia are not all that PRC-friendly, as I recall.
The NATO forces probably do use some Chinese products, but not of the military type, just everyday household stuff. BTW, the British Chieftain tank relied on a fan belt that was made in Russia. Duh.
The answer is, as always: “It’s complicated”. China has made itself economically indispensable (or at least really difficult to do without) for much of the world. In addition to the various connections to the West, China has made a lot of inroads in South America and Africa, building infrastructure in return for a lot of economic and political power and influence (in a Marshall Plan sort of way). Of course, China also depends a lot on other countries, not just as markets but as suppliers as well. And the flow of raw materials and parts for manufacturing and services on a global scale has resulted in a vast interdependency that would be extremely difficult to unpick.
The upside and the downside of this is that any sort of open antagonism between China and other countries will almost always hurt both sides proportionally. China could theoretically hurt the US quite badly with certain embargos but would itself take a big economic hit, and we’ve already seen what happens when the US imposes tariffs on China.
The only way to “win” an economic conflict is to manage things so that your side doesn’t take quite as much damage as the other, but China does not appear to be willing to pursue Pyrrhic victories. The US is occasionally that stupid but even then wiser heads usually eventually prevail. In the meantime, it might be wise to at least assess the extent of that interdependency and to see where things could be slowly unpicked to reduce the risk, but it’s not going to completely solve the problem.
People are always fighting the last war. We have plenty of stuff to engage in a physical war with China and kick there ass right now if we took the gloves off and just went for it. Problem is the next war will be decided in cyber space and all of those armies and navies and jet planes are just going to be sitting there dumb founded. They and the Russians are already actively attacking our infrastructure like hacking into the federal government sites, gas pipelines and meat packing plants while we seemingly do nothing. The war has already started but people will not recognize until it affects them, like them showing that they can take control of peoples 401K’s.
And those UFO’s sightings are not aliens, they are Russia and China testing out new systems to confuse our military.
“Most favored nation” status is the default trade relationship we have with all but a handful of other nations – it isn’t some sort of special or advantaged relationship. In fact, the name was changed to “permanent normal trade relations” in 1998 to reflect this.
I think many people in this thread are describing the China of 15-20 years ago. I know the popular image is of sweatshops and flimsy throwaway household goods, but the reality is much more complex than this.
For example, wages are already higher than many other Asian nations; the low cost of the goods manufactured in China is mostly about economies of scale. To compete with China, you’d need to invest billions in a network of factories and connecting infrastructure and then have relatively low labor cost on top of that.
Yes there are abuses e.g. in Xinjiang but in the context of this discussion it’s a relatively small piece of the pie.
In terms of the goods made, it’s at all levels of technology and price point. China already outspends the US for R&D and the recent fight over 5G is an example of the kind of areas in which they are now competing. They’re not afraid to drop billions on speculative tech like quantum computers, which is a complete punt at this point. But this is the kind of thing the US should be taking note of.
All that being said I agree with most of the posters’ analyses of the situation though. There’s a co-dependency between the US and China, and, if China were to try to choke off the supply of manufactured goods tomorrow, there’d be a lot of pain for everyone, but new suppliers could be found, and it would probably hurt China worse overall.
Is that what happened? The president of the time never stopped talking about “China virus”, and similar braindead shit, and the Republicans in general still haven’t.
Mountain Pass has been an on again off again rare-earth mine since the early 2000s in California according to Wiki it produced ~15% of the rare earth metals world wide last year.
My wife is an expert in this stuff and she says it’s the processing that is the problem (wiki says Mountain pass is also processing so there could be different definitions or things have changed recently). There are also a handful of new rare earth mines starting up in the US that should be fully operational in the next 5 years or so. The window for China to shut down RE to the US is closing rapidly. Biden has started an initiative to help the mines get up and going. The flip side is that according to the government it is probable the Chinese spies have already been inside my wife’s company and them building a new office is like an episode of Burn Notice.
I worked on projects for GM’s Magnequench division in the late 80’s processing rare earth magnets. The issue with processing is that in the USA we have to follow EPA regulations. The method used here creates an enormous amount of waste material because we use a sealed chemical reactor process using molten salts in sealed chemical reactors to extract the neodymium. Its sealed and processed under a nitrogen atmosphere because Neodymium explodes when melted in air. The molten salt becomes toxic waste when processed in this manner. In China they just melt it down in normal (reinforced for explosions) furnaces and let the pollutants flow into the open air.
There are a bunch of research projects going on how to improve that processing and ways to make it acceptable in the US. In the end it will be more expensive then what we’re getting out of China which is why the government is providing some help.
China isn’t really a threat to NATO. The threat from China is centered around the South China Sea, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, neighboring countries in Asia, etc. The real risk is that we become so dependent on China that we become helpless as they have their way in their ‘sphere of inflience’. Invading Taiwan, threatening Vietnam and Indonesia, threatening to cut off trade with Australia unless Australia accedes to various demands, etc.
China is an expansionist, imperialist power. But they take the long view. They took over Hong Kong without firing a shot. Their ‘belt and road’ initiatives are turning small poor countries into dependent states. Their embracing of, and subsequent influence over western media, higher education and entertainment is being used to export their values to us and force us to look the other way at their atrocities. China is perfectly happy to simply undermine its targets through propaganda and economic imperialism, then use its soft power to force those other countries to do its bidding.