Vulnerability of supply chains exposed in bestseller

The way we have organized our supply chains is an “epic failure”. The fatalities resulting from a shortage of life-saving gear during the COVID-19 pandemic have made this painfully clear. What possessed us to make ourselves so vulnerable and dependent on China? An interview with New York Times journalist Peter Goodman on his bestseller, “How the World Ran Out of Everything”.

The reason for the book is the “great supply chain disruption” during the pandemic. To everyone’s shock, for its basic necessities the mighty America turned out to be completely dependent on suppliers from China, on severely underpaid workers, and on a shadowy cartel of global container shipping companies. Peter Goodman, Global Economics Correspondent at the New York Times, couldn’t wrap his head around it all, and decided to get to the bottom of how things could have come to this.

In the first part of his book, he analyses the emergence of China as the “shopfloor of the world”. Today there are trade wars, but in the 1990s it was the US administration itself, led by Bill Clinton, that ensured China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The US business community also supported this move, already drooling over China’s huge consumer market and the opportunity to buy stuff dirt cheap. Yes, there were some concerns about the role of the Communist Party and human rights in China, but surely that would automatically improve once the country joined the free world.

Unfortunately, that did not happen. Although countless companies shifted their supply chains towards Asia, allowing them to pump up their profit margins, China became anything but a free country. A coercive state was set up, workers were exploited, Western companies’ intellectual property was shamelessly stolen, and the huge cash injections by the Chinese state disrupted the level playing field and completely wiped out competitors in the US and Europe. Workers in US factories lost their jobs, but shareholders in offices in New York and Seattle celebrated. … … …

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