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Comment by liminal | Hacker News Reader

Will sanctions need to broaden to include China or other countries supporting Russia?

Sanctions only work when imposed by a stronger country on a weaker one. Ecuador, for example, cannot impose sanctions on the U.S. For this reason, it is quickly becoming unfeasible to impose sanctions on China. Imposing effective sanctions on Russia is already hard enough, and Russia's economy is much smaller than China's.

China has hinted before at imposing sanctions on the US.

It's the first country that has been able to make that threat credibly in.... ohhh, a long long time.

They've imposed sanctions on US weapon companies recently. Soon once their domestic airplanes are semi-competitive with Airbus, they may even sanction Boeing.

This is what I suspected would happen once the US sanctioned Russia.

What would that even mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

China is heavily dependent on trade with The West, in a way that The West is not dependent upon China. And that doesn't factor in Asian economies like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam that are generally likely to side against China.

That ship sailed awhile ago - as was quite clear during the Trump admin, the US can't effectively apply sanctions to China, and even moderate trade disagreements didn't actually go the way the US wanted it to.

Additionally, if you want to see a crushing economic situation, imagine if China started to raise prices during already high USD inflation.

If the EU is unwilling to stop gas shipments from Russia, so much more is the USA unwilling to stop shipment of everything from China.

Why would China be willing to stop gas shipments from Russia? USA is also not willing to stop oil shipments from Russia, although Russia is the third-biggest oil exporters to the USA.

Independent states usually don't do anything that would harm them directly, they force their colonies and vassals to harm both themselves and the enemies. In this case, it's the EU harming themselves and Russia with sanctions, while the USA and China being relatively unaffected.

The EU isn't harming itself it is protecting 70 years of peace on the continent that is now threatened by a paranoid Russian Czar.

I would argue that this is less of a problem for the US than it is for Europe. China is an American problem Russia is ours.

Isn't it far more important to ensure that they can't use dollars, than avoiding giving them more? They already have dollar reserves.

If we can make dollars worthless for them, they will have given us the gas for free from their perspective.

> Isn't it far more important to ensure that they can't use dollars...

It's in America's National Interest to maximize the usage of dollar reserves. Denying China the use of dollars would have a (relatively small) detrimental direct effect, and will set a precedent and likely accelerate the popularity of other reserve currencies.

That's like using high-velocity lead to remove an ingrown nail.

Many sanctions so far are limiting Russia's ability to use money (in exchange for securities, other currencies, goods or services). I am only proposing that we proceed along the current path.

As an example, denying them imports is reducing the value of their dollars.

They wont, Which is why I said in the last sentence the west are clearly losing.

US Food and Agriculture are already beholden to China. From corn, soy beans, potatoes to Pork ( Smithfield is owned by China ), Tyson has 25-30% of their business in China. If you buy Beef or Lamb from AUS you have a 25% chance buying it from Chinese Owner. Or To Tech from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, where the growth are in E-Sport or PC Gaming in China. Manufacturing or assembly where they have a contingency plan to Foxconn as ICT or more commonly known as Luxshare. RISC-V ( Nearly all Chinese startup getting on RISC-V gets much better funding ) and IMG PowerVR, ARM China. YMTC against Samsung and Micron on NAND and DRAM, BOE against Samsung and LG on OLED. If you exclude Apple and Samsung, the rest of Smartphone market are 80% Chinese Brands. Solar Panel is partially all Chinese. NBA. ( And English premier league which seems to have some following in US, they will be targeting F1 soon ). Even Amazon clothing are losing to SHEIN. Unless someone make a revolutionary leap in battery otherwise the current trajectory would be China winning the price / Whr. ( Not even Tabless Battery from Tesla / Panasonic ). They are gunning for electric car manufacturing and are also the largest customer of Boeing and AirBus. But are working on their own JET. The increasing percentage of patents on 5G to Video Codec from China. To inside influence on tech companies via employees. We have another thread about Reddit and Youtube moderation, that happened already in 2019 during Hong Kong protest. And Tik Tok I mentioned in [1], expanding financial services like AliPay and WeChat Pay via tourist influence. And all these circulate back to SWIFT and US dollar as dominant currency. I could talk about it for hours and this list is just for US, there are whole lots of other things from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and SEA perspective.

For a long time I try not to be blunt but I am sorry I have to write this out so clearly. I hope Ukraine is enough of a woke up call.

I have been wondering if start up linked to certain political agenda will ever get accepted. We cant sit just here and watch.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30463767

How do you sanction China when a good chunk of western industries rely on Chinese factories? Without a collapse of western economies? Maybe the people who outsourced all our manufacturing and know how to China should have thought about all that...

We're still in the middle of a chip crisis and haven't still figured out that relying on the region constitutes a threat to our way of life. Are we bringing back all these plants to the west? We aren't...

Yes, this is the problem with sanctions and blockading without actually going to war. The chip crisis will pale compared to the steel etc. crisis in magnitude and importance.

A severe reduction in size of the global economy is not necessarily a "collapse," it's just that -- a severe reduction under either direct or indirect war conditions.

> A severe reduction in size of the global economy is not necessarily a "collapse," it's just that -- a severe reduction under either direct or indirect war conditions.

We have crazy levels of inflation right now among other economic problems and the FED or the EU central bank are running out of instruments to "tamper with". Anything at that point could trigger violent unrests across the west.

Whatever the consequences of "sanctions" are, they won't be happening in a vacuum.

The Fed’s tampering is the main reason for the inflation and the corner that they have painted the US economy into. Raise rates to proper levels to fight the inflation they created and risk recession; allow inflation and risk eventual revolt.

Which choice will they make? Should they alone have the power to make these decisions is the true question.

If there isn't peace in Ukraine soon and/or if Taiwan is invaded, it's WWIII and a rate hike won't matter and frankly the depreciation would be so rapid that it would be quickly irrelevant going forward. There would be rationing and a centrally planned economy, like in the previous world wars. Hopefully there are speedy and peaceful resolutions to this so that the worst of our problems is inflation.

The government's debt problems are mostly "to itself" -- the commitments to give free drugs and unlimited surgery for old people. Under war conditions obviously those commitments will be defaulted on. But then there comes a much larger and worse commitment to enormous war expenditures, and a far smaller private economy. A couple weeks ago it'd be nuts to say all this stuff but obviously things have changed now.

Unrest in Ukraine alone is not likely to cause a new world war. There has been a civil war mainly in eastern Ukraine for many years already. Ukraine has historically been an unstable area mainly due to its unfortunate position between the major powers Germany and Russia. Ukraine government is better served to remain neutral and avoid provoking the angry bears that exist on each side of the country in my humble opinion.

Not sure what you mean by depreciation during war. Some things will depreciate like fluffy tech stocks, luxury goods makers, and real estate, but other things like certain commodities and possibly food will increase in value.

Inversely, China is highly reliant on the U.S. for agriculture, Brazil and Australia for meat, etc. China has 1/5th the arable land that the U.S. does, with five times the population. You can't eat silicon chips.

China is nutritionally only reliant on the rest of the world for meat. If they reduce meat consumption, they can provide nutrition for all of their citizens with their arable land alone.

China produces cheap manufactured goods. But the U.S. is the world's largest producer of cheap agricultural goods. In fact, China's largest sources of meat source much of their feed from the U.S. The U.S. also pretty much only produces soy for export to China, as does Brazil. My point is that people thing the global economy would collapse if China stopped exporting manufactured goods, but China would starve without the rest of the world feeding their people.

China may be able to feed its people with its arable land, but the reality is that it would be only at a sustenance level. This is why China is investing so heavily in African agriculture.

A little under half of soybean production is exported from the US. The rest is used here for oil products, protein products and animal feed. Apparently, 90% of our cooking oil comes from soybean (usually sold as vegetable oil).

https://www.bizvibe.com/blog/agriculture/us-soybean

The more countries you cut off, the less you hurt them and the more you hurt yourself.

If you sanction every country you're effectively sanctioning yourself, not that that is what you're suggesting :).

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