Listen now | With the Xi-Trump meeting looming and the Iran situation changing every hour, how are China and the US trying to secure their respective interests?
China may narrow the semiconductor gap faster than the United States can narrow the rare earths and critical supply-chain gap. That may be the single most important judgment I heard from Andrew in this podcast.
And the logic behind that judgment comes from Cory’s core point: the strength of China’s supply-chain security is not simply that China can mine or process critical materials. It is that China has massive downstream demand and stable offtake.
Even if the West builds new non-China supply chains, it will still face a hard commercial problem: higher costs, insufficient customers, difficulty securing long-term offtake agreements, and a weaker downstream industrial base. If non-China supply is two, three, or even four times more expensive than Chinese supply, ordinary commercial buyers will struggle to absorb that cost unless governments subsidize it or defense agencies mandate procurement.
This is the most valuable point in the podcast: supply-chain security is not just about “replacing one Chinese supplier.” It requires rebuilding an economically sustainable industrial ecosystem.
Without downstream manufacturing, stable orders, scale economies, and long-term price tolerance, supply-chain diversification can easily remain stuck at the level of policy slogans and a few demonstration projects.
Francesco Sylos Labini makes a very interesting comparison https://francescosyloslabini.substack.com/p/china-from-an-assembling-country?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
China may narrow the semiconductor gap faster than the United States can narrow the rare earths and critical supply-chain gap. That may be the single most important judgment I heard from Andrew in this podcast.
And the logic behind that judgment comes from Cory’s core point: the strength of China’s supply-chain security is not simply that China can mine or process critical materials. It is that China has massive downstream demand and stable offtake.
Even if the West builds new non-China supply chains, it will still face a hard commercial problem: higher costs, insufficient customers, difficulty securing long-term offtake agreements, and a weaker downstream industrial base. If non-China supply is two, three, or even four times more expensive than Chinese supply, ordinary commercial buyers will struggle to absorb that cost unless governments subsidize it or defense agencies mandate procurement.
This is the most valuable point in the podcast: supply-chain security is not just about “replacing one Chinese supplier.” It requires rebuilding an economically sustainable industrial ecosystem.
Without downstream manufacturing, stable orders, scale economies, and long-term price tolerance, supply-chain diversification can easily remain stuck at the level of policy slogans and a few demonstration projects.