The world is waking up to the risks of relying on China for its critical medical supplies

For the US and Europe, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted China’s dominance in critical medical supplies.

The reliance is now an issue of national security and geopolitical risk, with more countries seeing it as an imperative to decouple and diversify away from China

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Workers at a medical mask production centre in Tangshan, Hebei, on March 30. Photo: Xinhua

Cary Huang is a veteran China affairs columnist, having written on this topic since the early 1990s.

Published: 7:00am, 22 Apr 2020Updated: 4:12pm, 22 Apr 2020

“Deglobalisation” and “decoupling” were buzzwords that dominated the global media amid the escalating US-China trade war, before the coronavirus outbreak began in January.

The worldwide spread of Covid-19 has only strengthened the arguments against globalisation and convinced many in the developed West that the process of decoupling is imperative. As the pandemic spreads and its epicentre has moved from China to Europe and the US, such voices have only become more prominent and, indeed, overwhelming.

In the beginning, the supply-side shock from China’s lockdowns disrupted the global supply chain and brought many major economies to their knees. The disruption not only caused a shortage of China-made consumer goods in many countries, it also laid bare the globalised manufacturing industry’s over-reliance on China’s supply of intermediate products.

The disruption starved many multinationals of needed components and equipment, particularly those making hi-tech products, consumer electronics and smartphones, depressing or disrupting their production at home. Still, the supply-side shock is more of an economic issue, and has little to do with national security or geopolitics.