White House to 'turbocharge' plans to remove China from global supply chains - report

Washington is allegedly looking to remove China from global supply chains, it was reported on Monday, in retaliation for its handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.

According to Reuters, the Donald Trump administration has long been looking at ways to make manufacturing less reliant on China, but it was now using the current crisis to ramp up those plans.

“We’ve been working on [this] over the last few years, but we are now turbocharging that initiative,” Keith Krach told Reuters. Krach is undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the US State Department. “I think it is essential to understand where the critical areas are and where critical bottlenecks exist,” he added.

Another unnamed official told Reuters: “There is a whole government push on this.” Another noted: “This moment is the perfect storm. The pandemic has crystallized all the worries that people have had about doing business with China. All the money that people think they made by making deals with China before, now they’ve been eclipsed many fold by the economic damage [caused by Covid-19].”

Washing and Beijing have long had an uneasy relationship, with Trump accusing China of benefiting unfairly from global trade rules. A bitter trade war saw both countries impose ever-larger tariffs on imports from the other side, and the Trump administration has pledged to return manufacturing operations to the US.

A temporary ceasefire to the trade war was agreed prior to the pandemic. But Trump has recently stepped up his attacks on China over its handling of Covid-19, including publicly backing unsubstantiated theories that the virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan.

Asked if he had seen anything that made him believe that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of the virus, Trump said last week he had – though he did not provide details – and said the World Health Organization “should be ashamed of themselves because they’re like the public relations agency for China”. And on Sunday, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said there was “enormous evidence” that it originated at the laboratory – but again, did not provide evidence.