Inside Out | US obsession with ‘de-risking’ from China ignores larger dangers
- The world economy today is fraught with risk, but not the dangers Washington is hallucinating
- Those truly concerned about supply chain risks would be drawing lessons from the pandemic and climate change, instead of pointing fingers at China
In reality, we are living in a profoundly risky world, and “de-risking” is a complicated business. No wonder some academics are talking about a world “polycrisis”.
It’s surely obvious that none of us can “de-risk” before we have audited the risks that surround us and decided which of them threaten us most, and which we can live with.
All of which seems simplistic and naive. It’s true that all of us – not just the United States – have over the past four decades of globalisation allowed ourselves to become heavily reliant on a breathtaking list of Chinese products, inevitable when China nowadays supplies a huge chunk of the world’s traded goods.
As Quartz recently reminded us, US consumers rely on China for 99 per cent of their electric blankets, 98 per cent of their collapsible umbrellas, 97 per cent of plastic flowers, 97 per cent of electric toasters and 95 per cent of their prams. But presumably these are dependencies most Americans can live with – unless, of course they believe that Chinese electric blankets contain chips that are tracking their sleeping patterns or sex lives.