@Viva_vietnamm , interesting China considers India, Vietnam the two big winners
China-India Brief #206
June 18, 2022 - June 30, 2022
Centre on Asia and Globalisation
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
Published Twice a Month
Guest Column
The last few months has seen the Chinese economy battered by a complex set of domestic-international challenges, including the intensifying great power competition with the United States, a domestic resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the devastating Russia-Ukraine war. This has accelerated the relocation of industries out of the Chinese mainland, contributing to a rising sense of anxiety within Chinese policy circles. Although the economic impact of this trend is often downplayed by the state-controlled media, there are growing
domestic concerns that China’s industrial chain is losing ground and will face increasingly stiff competition from the emergence of new manufacturing centres around the region.
New Round of Industrial Transfer: The Reasons
Chinese
commentators argue that unlike the labour-intensive industries (clothing, furniture, etc.) that relocated from China in the last decade, the latest pull-out appears to be dominated by technology-intensive industries. Three main
reasons have been put forward to explain this trend:
First, this is part of the
natural process of industrial transformation where low-value industries flow towards countries with lower labour and land costs. Second, challenges in the
external environment such as geopolitics and the pandemic have made operating in China untenable, forcing many foreign-funded enterprises to opt for a “China+1” operation model. Third and most importantly, Sino-US trade frictions which have been intensifying since 2018, and have greatly impacted important sectors like electronic components. The US-China trade competition is viewed by some as the
biggest driving force for multinational companies to leave China, with high-end manufacturing moving to the US and low-end industries relocating to Vietnam and India.
China sees two big winners: Vietnam and India
Chinese experts are of the
opinion that in the past few years, the manufacturing capabilities of emerging economies like Vietnam, India, and Indonesia, have started to catch up with China. For example, while China used to be the global mobile phone manufacturing hub, accounting for 75% of the world’s
mobile phone production in 2016, its share fell to 67.4% in 2021 as production centres began to move to alternative locations like India and Vietnam.
In the Chinese assessment, Vietnam has been the
biggest beneficiary of this round of industrial transfer from China. Between 2019 and 2021, Vietnam's exports to the US increased by almost 25% to
US$96.3 billion. Notably, the export of items like computers, electronic products and their parts exceeded US$10 billion, demonstrating the impressive growth of Vietnam’s high-tech manufacturing sector.
On the other hand, India has emerged as a
key destination for low-value industries leaving China, particularly mobile phone manufacturers. Many have been attracted by India's low labour cost and high tariff policy. The
supply chain of global brands like Samsung and Apple, as well as Chinese companies like Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Lenovo, TCL, Haier, Midea and other electronics and home appliance industry chains have taken root in India.
“Cooperative Vietnam” v/s “Competitive India”
Undeniably, the outflow of industries will be a blow to the Chinese economy. However, some Chinese experts believe that the negative impact to China would be far less if these industries relocated to Vietnam rather than India. After all, Vietnam is
constrained by a small domestic market, meaning that it could only play a minor role as a processing and transhipment hub in the global electronics industry chain. Thus, China
need not feel threatened by the loss of manufacturing to Vietnam, and could still treat it as an
extension/spill over of China's economic space, as an expansion of the international influence of China's industrial chain.
But the feeling is quite different when it comes to India. The South Asian giant, which is currently not quite a part of China-centric supply chain/network system but is set to maintain a
higher economic growth rate than that of China for the
foreseeable future, has an extended demographic dividend, a vast domestic market, an improving electronic industry chain, a more developed software and information industry, and language competencies in line with Europe and the United States. Unsurprisingly,
Chinese experts see India as an imminent challenger to China’s position in the global supply chain and an
adversary to be wary of.
Therefore, a
popular view in China is that even though Vietnam may be a pain-point in the short term, India, which has ambitions of becoming a manufacturing great power, is a bigger threat to China in the long run. It is within this context that China should strive to
“distinguish between friend and foe” (分清敌友) between a cooperative Vietnam and a competitive India.
Growing Competition, Rising Pessimism
In the light of the above discussion, the Chinese response to Apple’s recent decision to shift production of the current generation of iPhones from China to India is worth highlighting. A report in the Chinese media noted with
concern how India’s share of Apple's global manufacturing capacity grew from 1.3% in 2020, to 3.1% in 2021, and is expected to reach 5% to 7% in 2022. The report cautioned that India may become the next regional centre of Apple's global industrial chain.
Apple’s strategic importance to the Chinese economy cannot be understated. Some
credit Apple with helping China build an advanced and efficient consumer electronics industry chain and for boosting China's profile in strategic industries such as new materials, chip semiconductors, new energy vehicles, high-end equipment manufacturing, and big data. With Apple now transferring some of its businesses to India, will it allow the latter to establish an industrial system in direct competition with China? And will other international companies follow Apple’s lead and move their businesses from China to India? These are some of the critical
questions doing the rounds in various discussion forums in China.
It is against this backdrop that Chinese discourse on India is getting increasingly critical. India is being blamed for being
“opportunistic”, for exploiting the West’s anxiety vis-à-vis China to further its own interest. There are also
allegations that India’s frequent high-level exchanges with Europe, Japan, US, Australia, are attempts to convince them to transfer their investment and technology from China to India.
Chinese observers are also very critical of what they refer to as India’s
“replace/substitute Chinese industries” (对华产业替代) policy, aimed at
“forcefully decoupling” Chinese and Indian economy. According to them, this policy has
three objectives: the first is to replace ‘Made in China’ with ‘Made in India’; the second is to replace ‘Chinese capital’ with Indian or third-party capital; and the third is to replace the ‘US+West+China’ industrial cooperation model with the ‘US+West+India’ industrial cooperation model.
Adding to Beijing’s anxiety is the Biden administration’s unveiling of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in June 2022, a new economic bloc of thirteen countries that includes India, and conspicuously, excludes China. According to
Hu Shisheng, Director of the South Asia Institute at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, the realignment of supply chains (particularly innovation chains) between the US and India under the IPEF represents the single biggest challenge facing China and its economy. Hu believes that the Indian market has the potential to grow to a size on par with that of China’s in the future. Hence, if the new ‘US+West+India’ model does emerge, then critical supply chains could very well bypass China. This will deliver a blow to China’s power and position in the future digital economy and its ability to take advantage of the upcoming fourth wave of industrialization.
China’s course of action?
As evident from the writings of
Chinese scholars, China’s policy priority at the moment is to prevent the formation of a US-India supply chain collaboration as the engine of fourth wave of industrialization. To achieve this, the view in Beijing is that China must pull India into the existing
China-centred economic circuit (US+West+China) and forge a close China-India
supply chain system. By tying India closely to China through economic and trade means, Beijing plans to prevent the ‘US+West+India’ industrial model from ever coming to fruition.
But even as China wants to win over India, it does not want to bear the strategic cost for it, nor offer any tangible benefit to India in return, which in Beijing’s view, would further aid India’s rise. Instead, it has developed a two-pronged strategy towards India. On the one hand, it
contends that at a time when the US is employing various resources to attract India, Beijing will use the resources at its own disposal to contain India, including the disputed border, the Russia factor, and a highly efficient propaganda machinery to sow discord between India and the US. After all,
India, in its pursuit of benefitting from the US and the West, cannot let China-India relations to decline all the way to the point of a large-scale conflict.
Worryingly, the present
Chinese discourse on India is, in fact, very similar to that seen in the run up to the Galwan Valley clash in June 2020. Between late 2019 and early 2020,
opinions like ‘India is an opportunist’, ‘India is seeking to replace China’, and ‘China should teach India a lesson’ were all gaining currency in China. There are echoes of that discourse today, suggesting that there is a possibility of China once again stirring up trouble at the LAC or taking other punitive actions against India in the coming days. The idea is to remind India not to stray too far into the US/Western camp or else face the possibility of military conflict.
On the other hand, China continues to try lure India into a tighter embrace, economically. To compensate for the shrinking space for bilateral trade and economic exchanges due to the conflict over territory, China has been keen to use various
multilateral platforms such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS cooperation mechanism, etc., to nullify India’s decoupling tendencies, to reconstruct the China-India industrial chain and expand the fields of economic and trade cooperation between the two (including improving the quality of cross-border industrial chain financial services, promoting the signing of the China-India digital trade agreement and letting small and medium-sized enterprises become the main driving force for future bilateral economic cooperation). Most recently, the
14th BRICS Summit Beijing Declaration gave primacy to enhancing cooperation on supply chains, trade and investment flows, the role of MSMEs, and growing the digital economy partnership among the member nations.
Has China’s two-pronged strategy worked? As evident in the last two years, an active LAC or a looming threat of a large-scale China-India conflict has not been able to deter India from pursuing its economic interests or seizing opportunities arising out of the current flux in the international situation. Nor has the Modi government agreed so far to the Chinese proposition of delinking the border dispute from the rest of the relationship or creating a new economic ballast for stabilizing political ties. On the contrary, China’s approach has only created strong anti-China sentiment in India, pushed it further away from China, thereby making any kind of progress in China-India relations virtually impossible. Under present circumstances, it is highly unlikely that China can make much headway in its relations with India, without accommodating at least some of India’s long-held concerns or aspirations vis-à-vis China, be it in the realm of the disputed border, economy, South Asia or India’s membership of certain international organizations.
Antara Ghosal Singh is a Fellow at the Strategic Studies Programme at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. Her area of research includes China-India relations, China-India-US triangle, China in South Asia, Chinese foreign policy, China’s domestic development among others.