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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   36107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US.

The EU was arguing like that in favor of Russia for 30 years. But trade did not stop the Russians.

And for China, your points are true today, but Xi thinks in decades. At that time scale, it's all hypotheticals anyway.

  • It's possible that China gets its domestic consumption off the ground, making it less reliant on trade.
  • It's possible that the belt and road initiative leads to a massive increase in land access to trading partners.
  • It's possible that a variety of maritime drones, drone carriers and autonomous missile boats make aircraft carriers the battleship of the 21st century.
  • It's possible that the US turns inwards, and doesn't intervene in conflicts with Taiwan, or even in conflicts with Japan and India.

In all those cases, the US would want at least a strategic industrial base left at home for geopolitical reasons, and having it would out-weight the short-term loss that tariffs would bring today.

Even if China gets domestic consumption off the ground they're still reliant on imports for raw materials. China imports more than than 3 times as much oil is it produces, imports a little under three times as much iron ore as it produces, a little under 3 times as much copper ore as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They need global trade to keep their industry running and their people fed. You're not going to ship the 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and the 161,000 tons of grain that China imports daily by train.

Those exact arguments where used in the case of Russia. They were far from autark before they attacked Ukraine, but that doesn't matter. If you have your propaganda dialed in, your population is sufficiently willing to go along, you can deal with embargoes and even blockades for years.

Yes, the deficit would explode, quality of life would decrease. There would be rationing, followed by an inefficient adaption of domestic production.

China needs far less ore if they stop being the worlds factory floor. They can mitigate the missing oil by continuing electrification, by relying on Russia to break the embargo and by starting coal liquefaction if they really have to. They have more than enough arable land to feed their population.

They do not have enough arable land to feed their population.

Despite its place as the third largest nation in the world, China falls behind other major food producing countries in terms of the availability of arable land (figure 1). Rapid urbanization, pollution, and uses of land for other purposes have all contributed to a rapid decline of agricultural land in China. The total pollution rate in China’s farmland soil is estimated at 10 percent, and about 2.5 percent of that land cannot be cultivated due to excessive contamination with heavy metals. As a result, it is estimated that the country has a domestic planting area shortage of 90 million hectares. This cropland shortage is expected to worsen and will further undermine China’s goals for food self-sufficiency.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/July-August-2022/Critelli/

And if you can survive by drastically reducing your industrial output then you can’t use that industrial output to win a war with the US.

It's not even local imports from e.g. Indonesia either, it's majority trans-oceanic. Grain from Brazil, iron and coal from Canada and Australia, etc.
They can't try what Japan did with the co-prosperity sphere, even if they could cordon off the Pacific as far as Burma.

I wonder if they'll try to develop their domestic iron more. A thousand km over land from Liaoning to where the coal is in Shanxi, wonder how that competes with shipping from Australia.

Edit: woah, they're hauling in a ton of coking coal by rail from Mongolia now. , and they've actually succeeded in weaning themselves off Australian imports.

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