History is proof of when one country tries to become dominant, the fall can be very swift. What goes up too fast will come down, that is the nature of business cycle.
Australia has just started a rare earth mine in co-operation with US defence establishment in their country.
China is a big importer of food, and their top 3 importers in that sphere is US, Canada and Australia and they pick up a fight with all three. They can squeeze them anytime.
If you push a country too far who is capable of giving it back, your bad time has just started. Just one ban on an app like Tiktok from India and Bytedance IPO ($75B) dreams vanished and the company is struggling to survive. US just saw that and piled on the misery.
Do talk to Huawei folks and their misery is well underway. With impending ban from India on 5G from Huawei, they will lose more billions and market share.
International diplomacy is beyond me. But it'll be difficult to squeeze China on all sectors.
India could ban tiktok and the US could compel Bydedance to sell because it is not a sector squarely covered by the rules of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade and General Agreement on Services on Trade to which both India, China and the US are parties.
Considering the scope for snooping through an IT product, its much easier to apply a ban or regulate it citing national security (
under Article XXI of the GATT e.g. the 2018 restrictions imposed by the US on imports of steel) than something as simple as basic chemicals & compounds. It'd prove much more difficult for nations to justify how such goods are affecting national security if a ban was sought to be applied.
And herein lies China's strength. China is a huge producer and exporter of almost all commodities. Case in point, out of 1097 tariff items at the 4 digit level in our Customs Tariff, India imported goods under 1068 tariff items from China which is far more than any other country. This clearly demonstrates our huge dependency on China. The same is also applicable to all other major economies of the world.
You can check out this website to gauge the balance of trade of most countries in the world with that of China:
https://www.trademap.org/
My point is, its going to take a mammoth effort and unless all the major economies are in cohorts and conspire/scheme/take an initiative (
whichever term one uses depending on their ideological inclinations and biases) to put China out of business, I don't see it happening.
I reiterate, i'm no expert on international diplomacy as it is mostly abstract (
at least to me - its beyond my comprehension) and dictated by those in power at a given point of time (
it'll be interesting to see what happens if Biden wins) but considering the international agreements between the countries which are very much tangible and lay down a rule of conduct with some amount of certainty, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
However, aren't we digressing?
Fact is, China is producing cheap and it is a win win situation for us consumers! Competition is good!
