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Coronavirus pandemic: All stories
OpinionComment
Cary Huang
Cary Huang

The world is waking up to the risks of relying on China for its critical medical supplies

  • For the US and Europe, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted China’s dominance in critical medical supplies.
  • The reliance is now an issue of national security and geopolitical risk, with more countries seeing it as an imperative to decouple and diversify away from China

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Workers at a medical mask production centre in Tangshan, Hebei, on March 30. Photo: Xinhua
Cary Huang

“Deglobalisation” and “decoupling” were buzzwords that dominated the global media amid the escalating US-China trade war, before the coronavirus outbreak began in January.

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The worldwide spread of Covid-19 has only strengthened the arguments against globalisation and convinced many in the developed West that the process of decoupling is imperative. As the pandemic spreads and its epicentre has moved from China to Europe and the US, such voices have only become more prominent and, indeed, overwhelming.
In the beginning, the supply-side shock from China’s lockdowns disrupted the global supply chain and brought many major economies to their knees. The disruption not only caused a shortage of China-made consumer goods in many countries, it also laid bare the globalised manufacturing industry’s over-reliance on China’s supply of intermediate products.

The disruption starved many multinationals of needed components and equipment, particularly those making hi-tech products, consumer electronics and smartphones, depressing or disrupting their production at home. Still, the supply-side shock is more of an economic issue, and has little to do with national security or geopolitics.

But when Covid-19 spread to the rest of world, policymakers and politicians in the West were faced with a more critical challenge concerning national health, state security and geopolitics, as they all depend on China for critical medical supplies in their life-and-death battles against the lethal pandemic.
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Most developed economies rely on China to supply products such as personal protective equipment, testing materials, face masks, medicine and pharmaceutical materials. In this pandemic, China’s dominance in some strategically significant sectors, such as the active pharmaceutical ingredient industry, may well serve as a wake-up call for political elites in Washington’s corridors of power and the chancelleries of Europe.

Covid-19 has also awakened the need to reassert national security and state sovereignty, leading to a rising nationalist sentiment with loud calls for greater self-sufficiency in areas such as medical supplies. For instance, nearly 70 countries have limited or banned the export of medical supplies.

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