China is a huge economy, soon to overtake US. No, they don't lack natural resources. What they do lack is knowledge in some key areas (semiconductors) but they seem to be capable enough to just steal whatever they need.
What you seem to be forgetting is that US owes at least 1 trillion dollars to China and that overall, China holds over 2 trillion dollars in external debt.
More than that, US needs even more debt and there aren't many places at the moment where you can get a loan of the size that US needs.
Even more than that, US is currently incapable of producing much of the stuff they need and buying it from elsewhere (EU?) would cost a lot more.
I am pretty sure it would be US that would be critically wounded by the sanctions.
US companies are as much reliant on being able to offshore their work to China as Chinese companies getting that work from US.
The difference is, that these Chinese companies are able to produce stuff on their own vs most US based companies having no production capabilities of their own.
The US is completely dependent on China for manufacturing. China is completely dependent on the US for funding development. It would be bad news for either frenemy to start anything major.
Wouldn't that lead to the same trade deficit Trump decries, and thus new sanctions?
A production move would be expensive, and presumably hasn't already happened because of cost differences between China and, say, Vietnam. You might be able to keep the cost increase down, but not non-existent.
The US heavily sanctioning China would basically be the end of America's economy, it isn't a realistic option. There also won't be enough public support for it as long as conflict is contained to the APAC region.
Furthermore, it probably also means the disintegration of US global sanctioning power. Europe would rather trade with China than the USA, assuming it's mutually exclusive.
China has a fifth of the world's population, they would not be affected by sanctions and tariffs. The power balance is shifting in their favor, and they know they can't be replaced by any other 3rd world country with cheap labor, there is tremendous value from the network effects Chinese production facilities have. The USA effectively has a competitor now, and US politicians can talk all they want, but the fact that they have done nothing so far shows that they can do nothing at all.
China is the second largest economy in the world, and at current growth rates, will be number one in about five years.
You can't put sanctions on them. The world economy would collapse if countries stopped allowing Chinese goods into their economies. We can't just retool overnight.
The reason they get away with their concentration camps is precisely for this reason. There is very little leverage the rest of us have to stop them.
The best the world can do is slowly twist the screws until they are less powerful. This is already happening. You can see some manufacturing is already moving out of China into other parts of Asia because the US is making small but steady changes on how goods from China can be consumed. This is the only option right now unfortunately.
If China reverse-sanctioned the US, a significant portion of the Chinese population would fall into extreme poverty and starve. The Yuan would likely plummet, China would almost certainly face a national default, and it would risk a revolt against the current regime.
Meanwhile, within months, the US would have all its cheap shit imported from Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico--even Japan and Korea. We have enough retail reserves that aside from slight price increases on some inessential goods for a few months, likely nothing else would happen.
This is not smart idea. What you propose is a very hostile action that's akin to declaring war on not just China but any country that has involvement with US currency.
China is not your enemy. Yes they became number one, but the US economy and Chinese economy are interdependent on one another.
The better solution is to wait. Manufacturing costs in China will eventually rise just like the GDP. If the cost rises high enough manufacturing within the US will become viable again. This is exactly what happened with Taiwan and Japan.
That'll probably happen in the long term. In the short term, China might answer by completely banning US companies from the Chinese market.
I don't see anything to win here. Probably every large company, including those from the US, have some kind of production facilities, storage or supplies in China. China applying similar restrictions would probably be a worse hit for the US than the current situation is for China.
The way to do that is to simultaneously open up trade with anybody else. Literally offer a free trade agreement with anybody that also sanctions china.
This is completely idiotic policy for Netherland's own interest. They are closing themselves from a huge market, just to satisfy the misguided ideas from the neocon think-tank spawns that infected both the last and the current US administration.
It won't fucking work. Sanctions only work when targeted against weak countries, where they can have a devastating impact. Against a country like China, they just protect nascent industries. Yeah, profits are gonna suck for a while, investors are screaming bloody murder, but in countries like China, they don't care as much about what their wall street thinks, and investors understand that they sometimes are going to lose, something which became anathema in the west.
We are not in heydays of early 2000's globalism. Nation-States are not going anywhere and strategical national concerns became fashionable again. No force can stop it.
What is the US going to do? preemptively attack china? Have anyone thought about the logistical nightmare this entails? the fucking tragedy for supply chains and global commerce? How exactly the US thinks it is going to send a naval expeditionary force to south china sea? How those nice and expensive carrier groups pretend to survive the barrage of missiles, especially hypersonic ones? And then what? Hunker down in Taiwan while engaging in a decades long attrition war against China. Turning ourselves into a war economy so we can produce the mind-boggling amounts of ammo this would entails? and then to defend exactly what? the sacred ruins of bombed TSMC factories? Does those morons in the Pentagon and the State Department ever heard about the fact that wars cost money, and attrition wars even more, and that printing money by itself is not enough, because digits on a computer don't win wars, but raw steel, diesel and chips do?
The only way of dealing with China is keeping them dependent on western technology, leveraging the west's advantage not only in lithography, but also on optics and software to ensure that there's no economical way for them to develop a competing industry, simply because there will be no reason for China's industrial behemoths to shoot themselves on the foot by buying native chip technology that is worse and more expensive.
This doesn't work so well when your entire manufacturing industry explicitly relies on chinese production. Everything from debt to infrastructure has some dependency rooted in China. This is the whole point. Increase reliance on china for just about everything and it makes the idea of counter tariffs next to impossible.
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