The coronavirus has taught us one thing: we depend a lot on China. Over the past few decades, China has become the world’s factory. It doesn’t matter that Chinese salaries have grown markedly: China continues to offer many advantages for manufacturing: a network of quality suppliers, infrastructure, and skilled labor.
The problem with this dependence is that any natural disaster (such as a pandemic) could potentially leave everyone with no supplies of essential commodities such as masks or respirators.
To this, we must add all types of political issues: from the Trump trade war to the seizing of Hong Kong; many governments want to restrict trade with China. Does this mean that China is going to be isolated from the international market? Is this the end of globalization? In this video we’re going to tell you.
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In This Story: Hong Kong
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR), is a metropolitan area and special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta of the South China Sea. With over 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The whole territory was transferred to China in 1997. As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China under the principle of “one country, two systems”.