After the epidemic, there will be no significant break in global value and supply chains, and China will still be the center of world manufacturing.
The new crown virus is spreading globally. “The World is Flat” author Thomas Friedman sees the virus as the starting point of a new historical stage: the world before the new crown and the world after the new crown. What will happen to the world after the new crown?
This is the first in a series of “The World After the New Crown” series launched by “Super Opinion”. We will dismantle the real-time changes in domestic and foreign economic fields from multiple dimensions.
Text | Invited observer Tang Yao
Edit | Lu Fang
In the past 30 years, global technology, trade, and investment have developed rapidly, and various aspects of production have been spread to multiple countries. The research and development of a product can be completed in the United States, industrial design in Germany, production of various components in East Asian countries, assembly in Vietnam, and the distribution of the final product depends on the channels of the consumer’s country. . This cross-border distribution of production links forms a chain and network of production activities. From the perspective of the country and industry, this is a global value chain created by added value. From the perspective of an enterprise, this constitutes a supply chain that connects upstream and downstream.
With the deepening of opening up, China ’s participation in global value chains is also relatively high among major open economies. China, the United States, and Germany are the three cores of the value chain in terms of scale. Industry center. At the same time, China continues to strive to increase its upstream level in the value chain through industrial upgrading, improve the quality of participating in global value chains, and consolidate China’s comparative advantage in the international division of labor.
The new crown epidemic affects China’s participation in global value and supply chains in three ways.
First, domestic production capacity. In the early days of the outbreak, global manufacturing companies were worried about China ’s supply disruption, and domestic companies were worried that failure to complete foreign trade orders would result in long-term business loss. Some observers believe that such emergencies could push the supply chain to leave China faster and deprive China of its position as the world’s manufacturing center. From a historical perspective, after the earthquake in 2011, Japan ’s long-term upward trend in manufacturing output value was interrupted and turned into a decline, which indicates that a long-term supply disruption will have serious economic consequences. But unlike the earthquake shock in Japan,