Quick Summary
Additional Context
Diversifying manufacturing supply chains to locales outside of China has nothing to do with actually cultivating “substitutes” to the Chinese economy. The real stakes are these: China is an irreplaceable lodestone in global manufacturing, but that’s exactly what makes it necessary to supplement China-based manufacturing capacity with capacity in non-Chinese economies. The consulting lingo associated with this, ‘China+1‘, is pretty accurate in describing the reality of the situation.
Essentially, the idea is that the more dependent you are on China as a source of materials, labor, goods, etc., the more you must also develop redundancies in your supply chains that act more or less as insurance policies against the precariousness of sourcing everything from a single point-of-origin. This is