If nothing else, the Xi Plague has made painfully clear the absolute folly of depending on China. Leaving aside the moral argument of trading with a repressive, genocidal communist dictatorship, putting your economic eggs in one basket is a dangerous gamble.
Especially critical supplies.
An international study of essential supply lines has found that Australia relies on China for critical medical technology more than any other ‘Five Eyes’ nation.
As we saw, China has acted with brutal selfishness during the Wuhan pandemic. First, it allowed the virus to spread by lying about its existence, its prevalance and its transmission. Then, while the world was lulled into blissful ignorance, it secretively pillaged global medical supplies. Finally, it tried to big-note its supposed generosity by flooding the world with poorly made crap in return.
This is all in keeping with China’s decades of predatory behaviour towards the global economy.
The report, Breaking the China Chain, published by the hawkish London-based think tank Henry Jackson Society, examined the imports of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing countries: Australia, United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada.
The findings prompted 23 Conservative MPs to write to the Trade Secretary Liz Truss, demanding that the UK’s post-Brexit trade policy be recast to ensure strategic independence from China.
There are growing calls to build a new global supply chain which totally sidesteps China. Contributing to the Breaking the China Chain report, Australian politician Andrew Hastie is urging that the Morrison government establish a strategic industry plan “to build national self-reliance” in key industries.
Using international trade data compiled by the United Nations, the report found that Australia depends on China for 595 different goods ranging from ballpoint pens to pharmaceuticals to garlic. New Zealand was second-most dependent on China (for 513 different goods) followed by the United States (414), Canada (367) and the United Kingdom (229).
However, the survey homed in on the nations’ dependence on China for strategic goods. To qualify as strategic, an item had to be critical to a sector’s operation, rendering operations unviable or incapable of expansion if it were to be withdrawn.
On this measure, Australia remained the most dependent on China, with 27.6 per cent of total imports – 167 items – deemed critical.
Worse is that Australia has been blithely allowing China to buy up key strategic assets, from farmland to ports. Successive governments, left and right, have been foolishly blind to the peril they’ve fostered. Even more egregiously, the socialist Andrews government in Victoria secretively signed up to China’s notorious Belt and Road Initiative, defying security agencies and even his federal colleagues.
Andrews’s own office has included staffers linked to China’s propaganda outfit, the United Front organisation.
US Senator Marco Rubio said in a contribution to the report that the “strategic dependence” exposed by the report was “one of the greatest perils facing each of our five nations[…]
“Chinese capture of supply chains that produce equipment like face-masks and respirators has directly resulted in lives lost across all our countries. And with Beijing’s growing dominance over technological infrastructure, it even threatens to erode the sense of security that enables our countries’ close ties”[…]
David McCredie, CEO of the Australian British Chamber of Commerce said[…]”Australia and the UK, along with our five eyes partners have great opportunities to build greater confidence and capability in the industries of the future. The imminent Free Trade Agreement will focus on the opportunities in these sectors and are already reflected in the policy frameworks of both countries.”
Suddenly, Brexit assumes an even greater importance and opportunity for Britain than it already had. Freed of the strangling ties of Europe, Britain will be free to pursue trade agreements which bolster its security. In turn, it must avoid being strangled by China.
The same lesson holds even more true for Australia and New Zealand, the Five Eyes nations who’ve allowed themselves to become far too dangerously dependent on Communist China.
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