Brahma Chellaney bashes the West for allowing China to dominate all aspects of the global supply chain for too long, bringing low consumer prices and high corporate profits. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted “the costs of Xi Jinping’s increasing authoritarianism,” but also the downside of Western companies’ reliance on China, which has played a central, dominant role in an international manufacturing network. Supply lines have been crippled by quarantines, factory closings, travel restrictions and other stringent measures taken by China and other countries to contain the virus.

“Only by reducing China’s global economic influence – beginning in the pharmaceutical sector – can the world be kept safe from the country's political pathologies,” according to the author, who accuses China of “ weaponizing its dominance in global medical supplies and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). He points out that “97% of all antibiotics sold in the US come from China.

His country, India, as the world’s leading supplier of generic drugs, has to cut and restrict its own exports, because China had fallen behind in producing and exporting APIs since the outbreak, constraining global supply and driving up prices. It hits India because some 70% of the APIs for medicines made there come from China – the main global supplier. Relations between the two Asian giants are fraught with conflicts – they fought a war in 1962 over a disputed Himalayan border.

“If China’s pharmaceutical plants do not return to full capacity soon, severe global medicine shortages will become likely,” said the author. Indeed, Trump has also echoed remarks that US drug makers should diversify and overhaul supply chains, which today rely heavily on Chinese APIs. Beijing stands to lose big as US producers step up plans to end its chokehold on drugs, and reduce their dependence on China for the drugs and medical products that uphold the federal health care system.

Hawks in the Trump administration accuse China of using the same unfair trade practices that it has used to dominate other sectors — cheap sweatshop labour, lax environmental regulations and massive government subsidies etc. Some of them have been blunt in saying that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for a US decoupling from China.

They contemplate introducing “Buy American” laws, so that federal agencies are required to buy American-made pharmaceuticals and medical equipments. An executive order would close loopholes allowing the government to buy drugs, face masks, ventilators and other medical products from foreign countries. The hope is that increasing government demand for American-made products will provide an incentive for companies to manufacture in the US, rather than China.

The author hopes that “the specter of China exploiting its pharmaceutical clout for strategic ends were…..enough to make the world rethink its cost-cutting outsourcing decisions.” However, even if Trump wants to bring production back in the election year, so that American companies can produce at home and create jobs, few predict a manufacturing renaissance is on the horizon for the US. Nor is a mass retreat from the world’s second largest economy likely to be swift. It took decades to build the current industrial ecosystem, and China’s huge labour force and superior infrastructure will be hard to replace or re-create anytime soon.

The author ridicules Chinese leaders’ magnanimity, who are “publicly congratulating themselves for not limiting exports of medical supplies and APIs used to make medicines, vitamins, and vaccines.” If China decided to ban such exports to the US as a tit-for-tat response to the “unkind” measures to restrict entry by Chinese and foreigners who had been to China, the state-run news agency Xinhua recently noted, the US would be “plunged into a mighty sea of coronavirus.”

Supporters of reducing reliance on China have used the COVID-19 to highlight what they say is a longstanding vulnerability that could leave Americans dangerously short of medicines in the event of a war, trade conflict or pandemic. If China shuts its door on exports of core components to make medicines, within months pharmacy shelves across the globe would become empty and the health care system would cease to function.

It does not help mitigate the political fallout, when some in China, having acknowledged these vulnerabilities, touted that the world should thank China, rather than blame it for spreading the coronavirus, saying that if China banned the export of drugs, the US “would sink into the hell of a novel coronavirus epidemic.”