In recent years, in the so-called "mainstream society" in the west, there are three words that have been very popular, all of which are related to China. You have definitely heard them.
First,"China", second,"decoupling", and third,"de-risk."
The term "disconnect" was put forward by the United States, the intuitive meaning is to completely disconnect from China, interrupt trade, interrupt all aspects of ties, and de-risk is put forward by Europe, they may feel that the word "disconnect" is too heavy, but refuse to completely give up trade with China, but also want to suppress China, so put forward such a "reduction of the word".
And when the two come together, we can summarize it as “de-Chinese”.
From technology blockade to trade wars, from supply chain shifts to chip wars, this is essentially part of "de-China." At first, they only expelled Huawei and SMIC.
The gradually increasing tariff barriers in the United States are actually not allowing even shirts made in China to be imported. The United States can be said to use all means.
In order to fill the vacancy of China's "world factory", the West has tried its best in the past few years to support India's replacement. However, the actual situation now proves that this is just a failed "God-making movement."
“Made in China” and “Made in China”.
Why does the West want to China?
In general, because Chinese goods are really too cheap.
Any commodity, as long as it is consumed by China's technology, as long as it is successfully imitated by China, then by China's industrial scale, this commodity will immediately be hit as a white meal price.
This feeling, the United States understands too much, because in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the country that shouted "open gate trade freedom" was precisely the United States, which, by the scale of the industry, played the goods at the time to the white price.
Now, the country that received the American ID card of that year is China.
When some kind of Chinese goods are exported to Europe and the United States, native enterprises in Europe and the United States cannot survive, such as North Carolina, the so-called "North American furniture capital", after Chinese furniture entered the U.S. market, here soon lost.
In turn, the "capital of the XX" under Chinese products, in the past half a century, may be countless, but Europe and the United States are not afraid, because they still have the advantages of science and technology.
The Netherlands, a small country, relied on its monopoly on the lithography machine industry to become the fifth largest exporter in the world, second only to the four major economies of China, the United States, Japan and Germany.
Why?
It is nothing more than the export of high value-added technology products. Therefore, in the assumptions of Europe and the United States, China is positioned as the production of mid-to-low-end products, while Europe and the United States are the production of technology products, using the pricing power of technology products to harvest China's income.
But no one expected that China's science and technology has reached a considerable height now. If Europe and the United States don't carry out trade protection, the whole army will really be annihilated!
But when they really started to go to China, they discovered that “made in China” is really not something you want to get rid of.
China is the world's largest industrial country, and the United States is the world's largest consumer market. Only by adding consumer goods produced by China can it cover the entire American market. That is to say, without China, the United States would be in short supply.
Secondly, Chinese consumer goods are cheap enough, and no consumer goods in any country in the world can be cheaper than China, and the quality is good, so in the shortage of materials at the same time, there will be rising prices, leading to severe inflation.
The United States may have forgotten one thing, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had their own supply chains, so both sides could cut off and be able to "disconnect", but the Chinese-American supply chain is one, or the United States relies on China's supply chain, but China is the whole industrial chain country.
So cutting down would be unrealistic.
Nowadays, even technically, the West is dependent on China, the UK, in order to prevent Huawei from participating in the development of the UK 5G system, has delayed the original three-year full coverage of the plan to five years, losing more than £2 billion.
The same is true for wind power projects in Europe, which simply did not use China equipment, but one after another died. German wind farms were forced to stop working halfway through repairs, and France canceled dozens of wind power plans.
Even the U.S. own military supply chain relies heavily on China’s rare-earth refining technology.
Technical problems are difficult to solve in a short period of time, but the West has indeed tried to solve the problem of consumer goods by supporting India to replace China's status as the "world's factory", and this attempt has led to a failed "God-making movement."
The Failed “God Movement”
In the Western view, India is a big country, with plenty of industrial raw materials, a large population of labor force, and an average age is very young, that is, the population of the industrial age is actually more than China.
So since the West was able to support China and invest in India in the same way, it should also succeed.
So Foxconn, Amazon, Walmart and other companies went to India, and the United States drew India into the quarter-party talks, which can be seen in the deep support of the West to India.
However, India has several fatal flaws. The level of infrastructure is extremely poor, which leads to high logistics costs in India and very unstable electricity.
And India's illiteracy rate is too high, the industrial population needed for labor-intensive industries to at least reach the level of literacy, or at least have to receive compulsory primary education, but the majority of young people in India have not received education.
These people who have received basic education are also more willing to work in the service industry with higher income and better environment, so the Indian factory established by foreign capital is even short of people...
On the other hand, India's domestic foreign investment is quite unfriendly, chickens and eggs are killed more than once, all kinds of card approvals, environmental protection sweepstakes, all of which have to be deducted, but any appeal to the court, it will be a few years can not start work.
Politically, India sticks to its non-aligned position and has never established a formal alliance with India. The West has been busy for several years, but in the end it was in vain. India is "reserved" and cannot win over.
So in 2023, the situation changed drastically, foreign investment began to "great retreat" in India, or "great downturn", the closure of 2,800 foreign-invested enterprises, of which a large number of enterprises were issued sky-price fines, such as Amazon's $1.7 billion.
The West's plan to "arm" India went completely bankrupt. Now basically few people mention India's replacement of China's "world factory". This is just a "failed god-making movement".
Nowadays, the United States has ripped off the veil of hypocrisy on India and imposed a huge tariff of 50% on India. The India-US trade war has fought until now, and the current news is that India is ready to compromise.
The main concessions have two aspects. One is to reduce crude oil imports from Russia, and the other is to open India's agricultural product market to the United States.
The former will cause India’s energy costs to rise, thereby undermining India’s industrial development, while the latter will directly hit India’s largest group, farmers’ incomes, and the Indian Party’s support rate will decline further.
Isn't the United States aware of the impact these two points have on India?
Of course, it is clear, but they don’t care, because the United States has completed the “de-Indoization”, even the H-1B visa modification, so that many Indians in the United States have to go away.
India is losing this time.
References:
Indian manufacturers panicked: it was worse than China, after the U.S. imposed a 50% tax, what more than
"Wang Haixia: Can India become the next manufacturing country?" observer network