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Comment by dixie_land | Hacker News Reader

It goes both ways. The current supply chain crisis already demonstrated how reliant EVERYONE is on Chinese manufacturing. No politician would dare to sanction China when it means immediate runaway inflation.

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I'll keep posting this list every time this subject comes up:

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

China is 15-25% of the trade for those countries, but the west-aligned countries represent 80% of China's trade. A coordinated trade war would be vastly more devastating for China than the rest of the world.

I don't say this gleefully - I hope it never happens.

Every electronic thing made has parts from China. I can't build a car in Germany and export to America without having done trade with China first. Who cares if I could still get Irish butter if I can't get replacement parts for my MRI machine?

Pardon my ignorance, but isn't it the case that a lot of stuff coming from China is stuff produced in China, but using western technology? If that's correct, moving production outside of China would be so hard I can't imagine it, but not entirely impossible. It would be a huge crisis that would be eventually, heroically fixed.

Another problem is the access to resources like rare metals, that China stockpiles.

When I worked at Garmin, they made all of the aviation electronics in house on production lines in Kansas due to FAA requirements. I don’t know how deep the “must be made in USA” requirements go though.

Where are the resistors, capacitors, power ICs coming from?

Do you think those parts aren't currently being made elsewhere? South Korea is a powerhouse. The loss of China would be a capacity problem, sure. But market economies (aka price incentives) are terrifically good at solving capacity problems.

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