|
It would have very little effect, which is why it's not a primary threat now. Despite China's aims, their tech giants have made little headway in pushing their core businesses far outside of China. Huawei is the primary success story in that regard (the US has obviously been aggressively targeting them across the board). Baidu was supposed to conquer the world and defeat Google, it failed miserably and is largely just a China search engine today, nearly all of their revenue comes from China, so sanctions wouldn't do much. China's tech giants are, for the most part, captives within China. ByteDance did manage to build a global phenomenon in TikTok, however that too is now under threat of being turned back. Sanctions on most parts of China's system will have little effect, similar to how China's retaliatory sanctions on US Senators are largely meaningless. There are three primary ways to hurt China. 1) Cut them off on technology (eg semiconductors), which is an angle the US is using to an extent. There is some question over how long China will tolerate that before they just start ignoring international rules/laws/norms and start openly steal-cloning the tech they want (I'd bet they won't tolerate it for very long). 2) Humiliate them politically, through isolation & exclusion; cut them out of the global system; that requires a widespread effort from the top several dozen economies, it can be done however. 3) Target their export machine & dollar dependency, cut them off financially from the global economy (USD, Euro and Yen combined entirely dominate the global economy, along with the connected banking & financial systems); this will work for a while, however China is aware of the weak spots and is very aggressively working to build out their domestic service economy to lessen the importance of their exports to their economy, and they're always looking to lessen their dollar dependency. All that said, China is well beyond the point where you can really restrict them in the sense that you can most nations (like Iran or Venezuela). They've accumulated enough capability, tech, wealth, productivity, infrastructure, domestic know-how, etc. that they are fully free standing now. They have $60 trillion or so in domestic wealth. They have the world's #2 military. They have the world's largest manufacturing engine, and can increasingly manufacture at or near the highest tiers (eg jet engines & planes, semiconductors, etc). They have very few real weak points that can threaten them in a serious sense. The last time it was possible to squeeze China was before the great recession, when their economy was still far smaller than the US & EU, and back then it was hoped that wouldn't be necessary. |
The problem is that many of the world's economies already depend on China - either as a source of cheap products or, and that is an increasingly successful threat, for money. China has been buying up, building or financing construction works especially in South Europe (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Serbia come to mind), and are involved across Africa.