Portraying China’s manufacturing capacity as a global risk, this narrative is a variant of the “China threat” rhetoric, with its toxic seed germinating in the hotbed of the West’s anxiety, or probably fear, due to China’s manufacturing rise.
From a low-cost manufacturing base to the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse and an up-and-coming leader in advanced industries and innovation, China’s rapid elevation has unsettled some Western countries, who perceive it as an intolerable challenge to their industrial and trade dominance.
Responding to China’s manufacturing prowess with such apprehension smacks of hypocrisy and also ignores basic economics. China’s production capacity was seemingly not a problem at a time when many Western corporations capitalized on the country’s low-cost original equipment manufacturer (OEM) production capabilities.
Neither was it a problem when Western superiority was underlined by China having to sell a billion pairs of socks to buy a Boeing airplane, nor when China’s spare-parts production abilities helped propel worldwide sales of high-value-added products such as Apple iPhones.
