China is the world’s second biggest producer of silver and seventh largest producer of nickel. Bonus is that the biggest producer of nickel is Indonesia, which has a free trade agreement with China and the third biggest producer is Russia (lol, lmao).
Also love the example of Sorghum because China is producer #8 in the world and 4 of the top producers are global south countries that absolutely would not cut off trade with China. Also, lmao at the thought of the CPC just collapsing because people can’t get one specific type of liquor. Imagine Russia trying to undermine America by targeting its strategic vodka supply.
All this tells me is that the West doesn’t produce anything that is irreplaceable to China and that the think tankers and journalists are too delusional to recognize this.
I keep telling people that China can survive without us, but we can’t survive without China. They make the stuff and if things got desperate they could re-configure their economy to make the stuff they need at home. The US doesn’t make the stuff and would be absolutely fucked without trade. It might get really, really messy but at the end of the day they’ve got real manufacturing capacity and we’ve got high finance autocannibalism.
China can keep their “electronic equipment”, their “machinery, including computers”, and their “vehicles”. Let’s see them survive without Marvel Movies and shitcoins!
The US will never stop exporting their propaganda!
Mostly correct but I want to point that China does depend on the US for food. I mean I’m sure it’s something the CPC thinks about a lot and I assume they have a plan to reduce dependency but at the moment they import quite a bit of food from the US.
I have heard people assert (on what I think are fairly reasonable grounds) that China is mostly food secure for basic foods and relies on imports for luxury foods (tropical fruit, milk, etc) and soy and corn for use as animal feed.
If this is true, then in a blockade or war situation there would be rationing of meat and luxury foods but basically enough vegetables and grains to avert famine.
On a related note, China apparently has an 18 month stockpile of grain at current consumption, which Eldridge Colby (think tank ghoul) vagueposted about and got dunked on by Chen Weihua.
pick almost any vegetable and china grows near to or more than the next 9 nations combined.
their agricultural system is far more diverse and resilient than the US. they had their own agricultural revolution during the so-called green revolution financed by Western capital, and while it doesn’t grow a mountain of soy/corn like the settler colonial states, it feeds healthy food to a lot of healthy people.
98% of pork in China are foreign breeds. This is a serious issue, since China comprises about half of the world’s pork consumption. If there really is a sanctions on food import for China, there will be a massive plunge in living standards in China and they might actually start a war over it. This is why I don’t think even the US dares to think about sanctioning food.
Also, 18 months is a relatively short time scale for a war between two giant economies. The war in Ukraine has been going on for 18 months now.
98% of pork in China is from foreign breeds of pig raised in China or from meat/adult pigs? If it’s the former then a blockade is not going to suddenly kill all the pigs inside China.
And yes, it would be a massive drop in living standards food wise. However, widespread rationing of meat and fish is in the living memory of a big chunk of the Chinese population and if they didn’t overthrow the government then they’re probably not going to overthrow the government now that America is clearly the villain.
They won’t die but they have been genetically cross-bred to degrade over 1-2 generations, which means in 4-8 years the pigs will no longer be viable.
Capitalists are not stupid. When you purchase pigs, they don’t sell you their pedigrees, which are kept in highly secured facilities. They sell you the pigs that have been deliberately cross-bred to the point where they can control the rate of its degradation such that it can no longer produce meat at quality and quantity after a while.
The whole point is to force you to keep coming back and buy from them.
I have formal education in domestic animal genetics and broad experience in animal husbandry. that is not a real thing you are talking about. you absolutely need to bring a source to this discussion for that kind of assertion, because what you are talking about is biologically impossible.
breeders close herds all the time and breeds are maintained by breeding organizations. the commercial F1 hybridization lines are controlled, but there is no “self terminate” gene.
To clarify, I should have said the animals are less viable for meat production, not that there is some “self termination” gene.
https://archive.ph/TKZwr
the economist? a reliable source of anything but anglo billionaire propaganda, let alone factual material analysis… surely not.
the largest US pork producer, Smithfield, was purchased by a Chinese firm in the 2013. the largest feedlot on the planet, in Tar Heel NC has been owned and operated by the WH Group since then (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WH_Group). any “IP”, trade secrets and material (semen, records, maternal lines) are owned by them. but all of that is besides the point: chinese capitalists already own US pork production systems and facilities. the pork americans eat here was produced by their firms, with much of it exported to china. this is a good arrangement for them, because 1.) the mountain of feed is already here and owning a channel for adding value (converting grain into meat) is a way to engage in arbitrage when commodity markets get unstable 2.) the environmental destruction of this production system stays in the US 3.) worker rights and pay in US slaughter houses are the worst of the worst, unions are killed in the crib, child labor is rampant, etc. why would china want to bring any of these costs, which the US has externalized to broke rural communities, back home to china? not just the processing facilities, but the CAFO systems themselves are increasingly owned by foreign nationals (JBS Brazil, various Dutch psychos, etc), because worker and environmental protections in the US are a joke.
animal breeds are a constantly changing artifact. pigs were domesticated in the near east and far east long before being brought to europe. the commercial breeds used today for CAFOs are wildly different in appearance and conformation to those of the exact same name 100 years ago. today, the industrial ag system optimizes for a single breed characteristic: feed to muscle gain ratio, based on a tweaked feed ration made primarily of the cheapest grain components. traits like “environmental hardiness”, “mothering ability”, “disease susceptibility”, “fat production” etc are all ignored under the CAFO system. the point being, what defines an “elite” line is the system it is bred to inhabit, and generally the defenders of that system (which is 100% where the minds that wrote that article are coming from… “the west has magic animals, they need our magic animals, our system is super relevant!”). meanwhile, the most expensive pork on the planet comes from one place in southern japan. “kagoshima kurobuta”. the black pig. though japan already raised pigs for thousands of years, in the 1800s a diplomatic mission brought Berkshire pigs (from Berkshire england). on the generally rural southern island of Kyushu, the community developed a production system around the breed (similar to the Kobe place / Waygu breed assocation) with the understanding that spent mash (high protein) from making a sweet potato based alcohol would be constantly available in the area. what i mean by this is, aside from some wack ass outlier, any community with reasonable access to resources and in contact with the outside world can take a handful of animals and make whatever they’re looking to make happen.
all industrial firms seeking to maximize production maintain at least two breed lines, which they cross to generate an F1 hybrid and that animal is raised for animal products. hybrid vigor has been the move in commercial agriculture (plant and animal) since commercial agriculture was a thing. a herd of a breed can be closed at a surprisingly small population, though the smaller the size the closer it must be monitored for undesirable recessive traits. it also takes very little outside influence to overcome issues associated with line breeding. but the main point is this… in industrial agricultural systems (plant and animal) there are plants/animals grown for products, and plants/animals grown for genetics. the plants/animals grown for products aren’t bred back into the production system, because the first generation vigor is gone and the offspring are going to have a mix that would be difficult to manage genetically. and this is really only for very energy intensive production systems where they are pulling out all the stops to maximize the amount of animal product (or plant product) coming from an individual animal, which is the mindset of industrial systems.
god I fucking hate capitalism
If the rest of the world proves too much to be shitass barbarians I fear they may return to their historical isolationism, which may be fine for them, and would be impossible to blame them, but will leave the rest of us a bit fucked
Maybe they will let a few brics countries join them in the civilizationsphere. Not where I’m thinking either of us are though