The reality is soon China will reach a point where they will be completely independent from the rest of the world. There is currently very little they can't produce for themselves and, ironically, it is mostly semiconductors.
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/iron-ore-statistics-and-in...
Also, China has recently started supplementing their iron ore supply by buying it from african countries, which will be much harder to convince to follow a potential embargo.
Iron ore is available almost everywhere in the world but with varying difficulty of extracting. If you know geography, iron ore is a sediment in an ancient ocean which means most of the planet is covered with a band of the ore at varying depths.
You forgot food
There is a word for industrial, political and financial independence from the rest of the world - "sanctioned".
Unless China were an entity far and away superior in every sense than every other country in the world (i.e. unless they were a Star Trek level culture living in our current world), striving for complete trade independence becomes a negative for their economic progress.
China lacks many of the natural resources it must use to continue to grow. It must trade with the rest of the world to continue to grow; but the inverse is not true. The world DOES NOT need to trade with China.
China is a huge economy, soon to overtake US. No, they don't lack natural resources. What they do lack is knowledge in some key areas (semiconductors) but they seem to be capable enough to just steal whatever they need.
What you seem to be forgetting is that US owes at least 1 trillion dollars to China and that overall, China holds over 2 trillion dollars in external debt.
More than that, US needs even more debt and there aren't many places at the moment where you can get a loan of the size that US needs.
Even more than that, US is currently incapable of producing much of the stuff they need and buying it from elsewhere (EU?) would cost a lot more.
I am pretty sure it would be US that would be critically wounded by the sanctions.
US companies are as much reliant on being able to offshore their work to China as Chinese companies getting that work from US.
The difference is, that these Chinese companies are able to produce stuff on their own vs most US based companies having no production capabilities of their own.
> Well, people like you cause wars.
Doubtful. I tend to see the world as something more than a zero-sum game. I also don't run a country and have very little chance of ever doing so, let alone leading one to war.
Also, in a world awash with cash, where bonds can be issued with a negative yield, and still find buyers, and where central banks can issue arbitrarily large sums of currency, this following comment is just plain confusing;
> More than that, US needs even more debt and there aren't many places at the moment where you can get a loan of the size that US needs.
What Biden's doing is much smarter; he's patching up one of our biggest actual weaknesses which made the sanctions stalemate extra painful. It sounds like he's also prioritizing getting the rest of our allies in on it (instead of fracturing our ties with them), which is a great thing to be doing. In some ways I think Europe/Japan/Korea/Australia are going to decide which of us will be the next superpower. If we go all isolationist, and Europe gets cozy with China as a result, the contest is over.
Strategy and preparation are better than bluster and Twitter-insults.
>“He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,”
>“Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”
>Bolton says he was so alarmed by Trump’s determination to do favors for autocrats such as Erdogan and Xi that he scheduled a meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to discuss the president’s behavior. Bolton writes that Barr agreed he also was worried about the appearances created by Trump’s behavior.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-asked-chinas-x...
They also have a demographic problem: their boomers are retiring. Also they have crazy debt to gdp and they are 80% reliant on mideast oil. If iran goes to war with saudi arabia they are efffffed, even with belt and road, because that's three economic catastrophes converging.
So give me a break with Biden is "much smarter'. It would take a fool to not do what they did. But the problem is much broader then just tech. The government cares about tech because this directly relates to defense.
The Trump strategy was basically to try to cut as much foreign investment into China and stop investment from coming out of China. It wasn't necessarily stupid.
The Biden strategy is essentially an arms race Cold War 2.0 and its not a bad idea but to say it "much smarter" demonstrates a bias which show you are not thinking of the double edged sword and implication of the Biden strategy.