‘We cannot trust China to continue to manufacture our pharmaceuticals…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Since President Bill Clinton granted China “Most Favored Nation” status, allowing the communist country to grow into the world’s second-largest economy at the expense of millions of American blue-collar workers, U.S. corporations have flocked to the East Asian giant to cash in on cheap labor.
But as the Chinese Communist Party has tightened its grip in recent years, doing business in the totalitarian state has proven too expensive — in more ways than one — and many U.S. companies have considered leaving.
Now, new data compiled by the Hong Kong-based research firm, Qima, shows that the exodus has begun.
“The Qima report is based on data collected from tens of thousands of supply chain inspections conducted globally for consumer goods brands and retailers,” the Epoch Times reported on Monday.
“Companies use these inspection reports to make decisions about whether to migrate to a new supplier,” it said.
The result was a 45 percent increase in supply chain inspections for North American companies compared to the same period last year, indicating that they are on the move.
Additionally, a poll of more than 200 companies conducted in February showed that 87 percent of respondents expected the Wuhan pandemic to trigger changes in their supply chain decisions, which the new Qima figures bear out.
However, fleeing U.S. companies do not appear to be coming home; rather, the supply chain report shows they’re mainly looking to relocate to other cheap labor countries that are more friendly to U.S. interests, such as Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines and Bangladesh.
In September 2019, President Donald Trump urged U.S. companies to ditch China ahead of aggressive tariffs meant to force the CCP to engage in fairer trade practices.
The devious political choices the Chinese government made that allowed the Wuhan virus to spread around the world also forced the hand of top companies operating in China, especially as tens of millions of workers failed to show up at factories in the country’s industrial centers.
Chinese state-run media also reported in March that the CCP had threatened to impose pharmaceutical export controls over vital drugs as leverage against American citizens.
“We cannot trust China to continue to manufacture our pharmaceuticals, things like antibiotics, penicillin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, to say nothing of dozens of other basic pharmaceutical ingredients,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas said at the time.