This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
As well as dominating EV and battery production, China processes more than half of the world’s lithium, cobalt and graphite, which are crucial inputs.
🤣 Looking at those charts, the US is fucked. Why wouldn't you use this as an opportunity to accelerate trade and cooperation based on a greener future? As hard as that sounds don't we want our politicians to do the hard graft and negotiation that is necessary?
But if course not, let's do Cold War 2 EV Boogaloo instead.
🙄 All the US is doing is bifurcating the global economy. China will just do business elsewhere.
I kinda think that's the plan. The US beat the Soviets that way, they probably think they can repeat that success. Population trends imply this might well work out for the US, but then again AI and Climate Change are real economic wild cards.
I am honestly not sure how much the US would care if China did less business with them, I think lots of people would actually be happy about that after the supply chain issues seen with COVID19.
The US doesn't want China replacing the US in other countries, though, because that still means less business for the US.
I don't think this is going to play out the same way it did with the Soviets. The Sino-Soviet split happened specifically because China could see what the United States was doing and how it was going to win the Cold War, so they played the long game and made themselves an essential part of the global economy. I guess it all comes down to whether or not China is ready for this - and it looks like they are.
I'm just not as convinced that China is as essential going forward as they were for the last 40 years or so. There's a bunch of reasons for that. But as to other countries wanting to do business with them there's a lot political going on too.
That said, I think a lot of people overestimate how much the US needs China. There are plenty of countries that would step up and be happy to get any set of consumer spending from western countries IMO. I think a lot of multinationals could make it the next "offshoring" cycle to move production from China to Mexico, India, etc etc. The other thing people forget is the west can and does play dirty too.
Like I said - all that would make it seem like just assuming China has a long term plan that is going to obviously beat the US is buying their propaganda IMO. The bigger issues though are the wildcards - will LLM AI actually provide a huge productivity boost again and let China manage their shrinking population in terms of economic output? Will it do it in a way that doesn't also advantage using the enhanced automation within Western countries vs China's previous inherent cheaper labor due to lots and lots of people?
Will Climate Change make it more and more difficult to have a global shipping network, making it even more expensive to have a world manufacturing hub in the future? Will the US Navy keep patrolling the seas to prevent piracy?
But back to being an essential part of the global economy. China doesn't have a lot of settlement networks outside China that third parties are using. China doesn't even let you take Yuan out of the country in most cases, even if someone wanted to take it in payment. So China isn't a big Finance player outside their borders. COVID already showed that we can survive if China stops shipping stuff for a while, and I think that will get more robust and diversified as time goes on.
