As I read this I stared thinking about the "wildest" scenarios I could around China attempting to enforce climate action on the USA.
With the understanding that it is a somewhat "beyond science fiction" level scenario. What would happen if China imposed trade sanctions against the US such that they just stopped shipping goods entirely?
I mean manufacturing would obviously restrung to the US but not right away. What would it be like if ALL Chinese manufactured goods just stopped? For sake of argument maybe include other nations that agree with the necessity of climate action. (India, Europe, etc...).
What would America be like if global manufacturing & trade to the us halted and full trade sanctions (like Iran/Cuba) were imposed?
>What would America be like if global manufacturing & trade to the us halted and full trade sanctions (like Iran/Cuba) were imposed?
What would China be like?
Beyond the economic damage it would do to China, the whole idea is laughable because China dwarfs the US as an emitter.
But to entertain the hypothetical: the US is the single country that could hold up under autarky. We have fertile land, wooded forests, productive mines, lots of fossil fuels, an educated population, and ample industrial infrastructure (much latent, but much still churning, like semiconductor fabs, car plants, steel, etc.)
Well yeah, that's part of the thought experiment and part of the reason it is such a iwildly beyond-science fiction scenario.
Globally, the economic impact of cutting off ~350 million consumers would hurt but if you follow that line of thinking, there are globally, 7 billion other customers you could sell your goods to.
Is America rich per-capita for arbitrary reasons? Because, for some reason we all have decided to say they are?
So think, China can't sell all that cool shit in the US anymore. WHo gets it? CHinese citizens? Maybe they find a developing nation and sell it to them?
What would happen to the US dollar as a mark of global currency if you couldn't trade in US dollars anywhere but within America?
THey'd have to rebuild factories, jobs in running them, there's likely enough food in the farmland, but oil and gas with no imports would mean they'd have to find other sources of energy.
I mean, again, thought experiment. Science fiction.
America wouldn't just suddenly stop because of the end of trade... but how would they respond? What would the impact be to other nations if cooperation and trade was directed elsewhere?
First, a reality check: 2015 imports from China were $582 Billion [0]. The Chinese GDP in 2015 was about $10 Trillion [1]. That makes the US responsible for consuming nearly 6% of the Chinese economic output. I'm not an economist, but I think that means that stopping all exports to the US would put about 6% of China's workforce out of work. Given their reliance on employment as a deterrent to civil unrest, I'd say it's something they wouldn't even contemplate.
As to the hypothetical effect on the US, I'd say that 100 years hence, historians would comment on how remarkably the US had snapped into action and replaced all the imported products and sources with domestic and non-Chinese sources. That would be coupled with a rationalization of what products American consumers didn't need and only bought or upgraded because they were cheap. There would be a lot of 'oh, I didn't need that anyway'.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are many other established and up-and-coming non-Chinese manufacturing hubs that could ramp up to absorb some of the displaced Chinese sources: Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and others.
It's be a much less jarring event to the US than it would be to China, but actually enduring the process would be extremely unsettling and a lot of Americans would have to endure hardship during the transition.
And just as another probability we can also consider this. 6% of economic output isn't something dramatic - just think, many companies can have quarter-to-quarter results fluctuating more than that - so it's entirely possible that China won't notice that much, especially if the reduction is evenly spread.
More, in autocratic economies people sometimes have higher tolerances to sudden economic turmoils, so it could be just another example of that. Those 6% could even be redistributed, possibly lowering prices elsewhere but in general decreasing, dampening and postponing the direct effect - so possibly not creating anything of a huge problem for China.
Regarding USA springing back into self-reliance mode, one can - just as an example, possibly not particularly relevant - see how other countries behave, and how quickly they adjust. As recently demonstrated by Russia, some "remarkable snapping into action" suspiciously didn't happen, and so far economy slides downward two years in a row. That's after lots of rationalizations of Russians which products they don't really need - and reminding that, again, the tolerance to economic hardships there could be bigger than in US.
Of course it's also unreasonable to imagine that not only China, but a whole set of countries could decide against US simultaneously. Never had examples of that in the past, right?
Once again, this is just another perspective to the reality check proposed.
If it were unilateral action by China, the impact on China might be big. But if they can could a couple other big economies to go along, and if they all stopped both exports to and imports from the US, then the impact would just be the size of their trade surpluses with the US, not the size of their exports to the US, and much of their exports that would have gone to the US could go to other countries to replace the US exports to those other counties.
China is not suddenly truly interested in emissions cuts. They are interested in preserving the existing framework in which they get to keep growing their emissions while Western countries have to cut theirs. They are being very disingenuous, and good for them, because if they succeed they're going to eat our lunch. I hope we're not that stupid.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] threadWith the understanding that it is a somewhat "beyond science fiction" level scenario. What would happen if China imposed trade sanctions against the US such that they just stopped shipping goods entirely?
I mean manufacturing would obviously restrung to the US but not right away. What would it be like if ALL Chinese manufactured goods just stopped? For sake of argument maybe include other nations that agree with the necessity of climate action. (India, Europe, etc...).
What would America be like if global manufacturing & trade to the us halted and full trade sanctions (like Iran/Cuba) were imposed?
What would China be like?
Beyond the economic damage it would do to China, the whole idea is laughable because China dwarfs the US as an emitter.
But to entertain the hypothetical: the US is the single country that could hold up under autarky. We have fertile land, wooded forests, productive mines, lots of fossil fuels, an educated population, and ample industrial infrastructure (much latent, but much still churning, like semiconductor fabs, car plants, steel, etc.)
Globally, the economic impact of cutting off ~350 million consumers would hurt but if you follow that line of thinking, there are globally, 7 billion other customers you could sell your goods to.
Is America rich per-capita for arbitrary reasons? Because, for some reason we all have decided to say they are?
So think, China can't sell all that cool shit in the US anymore. WHo gets it? CHinese citizens? Maybe they find a developing nation and sell it to them?
What would happen to the US dollar as a mark of global currency if you couldn't trade in US dollars anywhere but within America?
THey'd have to rebuild factories, jobs in running them, there's likely enough food in the farmland, but oil and gas with no imports would mean they'd have to find other sources of energy.
I mean, again, thought experiment. Science fiction.
America wouldn't just suddenly stop because of the end of trade... but how would they respond? What would the impact be to other nations if cooperation and trade was directed elsewhere?
Or would there be war in short order?
On a per capita basis, which is the relevant comparison, the US is by far a larger emitter than China, by a huge factor.
As to the hypothetical effect on the US, I'd say that 100 years hence, historians would comment on how remarkably the US had snapped into action and replaced all the imported products and sources with domestic and non-Chinese sources. That would be coupled with a rationalization of what products American consumers didn't need and only bought or upgraded because they were cheap. There would be a lot of 'oh, I didn't need that anyway'.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are many other established and up-and-coming non-Chinese manufacturing hubs that could ramp up to absorb some of the displaced Chinese sources: Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and others.
It's be a much less jarring event to the US than it would be to China, but actually enduring the process would be extremely unsettling and a lot of Americans would have to endure hardship during the transition.
[0] http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html
[1] http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/201601/t2016011...
More, in autocratic economies people sometimes have higher tolerances to sudden economic turmoils, so it could be just another example of that. Those 6% could even be redistributed, possibly lowering prices elsewhere but in general decreasing, dampening and postponing the direct effect - so possibly not creating anything of a huge problem for China.
Regarding USA springing back into self-reliance mode, one can - just as an example, possibly not particularly relevant - see how other countries behave, and how quickly they adjust. As recently demonstrated by Russia, some "remarkable snapping into action" suspiciously didn't happen, and so far economy slides downward two years in a row. That's after lots of rationalizations of Russians which products they don't really need - and reminding that, again, the tolerance to economic hardships there could be bigger than in US.
Of course it's also unreasonable to imagine that not only China, but a whole set of countries could decide against US simultaneously. Never had examples of that in the past, right?
Once again, this is just another perspective to the reality check proposed.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN12W349
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/01/when-china-calls-out-donald-...
I wonder it their out-link now works to disable paywalls like the google search web links do for some?
https://out.reddit.com/t3_5ck2cc?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.co...
Or
https://www.google.com/search?q=China%20warns%20Trump%20agai...