China is the world's second biggest producer of silver and seventh largest producer of nickel. Bonus is that the biggest producer of nickel is Indonesia, which has a free trade agreement with China and the third biggest producer is Russia (lol, lmao).
Also love the example of Sorghum because China is producer #8 in the world and 4 of the top producers are global south countries that absolutely would not cut off trade with China. Also, lmao at the thought of the CPC just collapsing because people can't get one specific type of liquor. Imagine Russia trying to undermine America by targeting its strategic vodka supply.
All this tells me is that the West doesn't produce anything that is irreplaceable to China and that the think tankers and journalists are too delusional to recognize this.
'and allies' doing some heavy lifting considering the thread doesn't mention the US producing anything. According to this, 86% of China's imports are from Canada, Australia, and the UK. Maybe the US does produce some, but doesn't have significant contracts with China.
Either way, it'll be a challenge to convince CAUK to stop selling to China during their recessions because the US can't do much with the raw materials and it's traders aren't going to be overly interested in buying up the nickel for a rainy day. US bonds might be a fix but who wants to sell valuable resources for tickets to a sinking ship? Maybe they won't know the US can't avoid the iceberg at this point?
Regardless of any of this, Cha doesn't seem to realise that China will likely be able to survive a lot better without nickel than the west can survive without… more or less everything. I don't think these 'intellectuals' have fully come to terms with what neoliberalism means yet.
The parts of the working class that gets or would get it's hands dirty knows; they've seen their mining towns, ports, farms, and factories deteriorate or disappear. But the commentariat doesn't seem to be aware that anything like a blitz spirit or post-war boom isn't possible if you don't have the industries to make anything or a political economy that could conceive of increasing domestic industrial capital.
"We will stop selling to our enemies" and "we will instruct our colonial subjects to stop selling to our enemies" sure hits different.
Im 1000% sure that the recent US strategy is to impoverish and make americans stupider as to do scarier jobs and go back to working in factories. They already know that the dependence on Chinese economy has to end