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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Western sanctions can do a lot, and I mean seriously a lot, but coerce China into abandoning their closest major ally and source of cheap oil? Good luck. China can survive without the West far better than the West can survive without China. The nuclear "I will get my way no matter what" option doesn't exist in a truly multipolar world.
First of all I am actually curious what you think about this as you seem to have done some research on the matter, thanks for your reply!
Sure, would have been better to use the nuclear option 10+ years ago. Let’s see how we got there, to what you describe as a multi-polar world.
When China was taking over the solar industry, in which Germany invested tons of money, just so that China can steal the technology and make profit off that by selling them to Europe which was happily subsidizing them, killing its own industry (China did only subsidize domestically produced solars for context). Then came EVs - again, European companies were busy shifting production to China, sharing technology, and subsidizing all the EVs no matter where they come from again, Chinese included, while China would only subsidize Chinese EVs. Now France is busy exporting plane parts, so that Chinese Comac can build their own planes by scraping together European parts, and gradually replacing the European parts with Chinese clones, and then actually improved Chinese designs. Would be impossible if you just banned plane part exports to China and would delay they efforts for ages, but apparently learning from mistakes isn’t the strongest trait of our leaders. But who could think that sharing technology and shifting production to an authoritarian regime could eventually backfire?
Does this mean that nothing can be done and we have to accept our fate? No, Europe has still many strong sectors. Sure, not much can be done about solars at this point, but, as an example, banning plane part exports and stopping subsidizing Chinese EVs, would still greatly hurt the pace of further growth of the beast that we’ve raised. And Trump is on the same page with China, so if we sit down and talk together with the US, we can actually still do a great harm to the Chinese economy as two of the three biggest polars of the current day multipolar world. Let’s cooperate with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada on that, let’s bully India and Vietnam a bit which would love to get some western foreign investments, and China is screwed. Yes, we should have done that in 2016, but we were busy bailing China out when US finally started fighting them. I don’t get why no one did it before and why no one does it to this day.
Regarding cheap oil - China doesn’t need cheap oil anymore. They invented their own, alternative energy sources, and the falling global oil prices are partly attributed to the declining demand from the Chinese side. Their alliance with Russia is not an economic one because Russia barely has anything to offer for China nowadays, with their economy of a size of Spain. What Russia has is nukes, a similar authoritarian regime, a great network of spies, and a will of destabilizing the European continent, which China loves, as it keeps Europeans busy with Russia, and shifts the focus away from China.