The Butterfly Effect
If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it may cause a tornado halfway around the world. — mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz.
Western media is reporting a new Covid surge in China. Putting that in perspective, the number of new cases reported Tuesday in that country more than doubled to 3,507. Meanwhile, the number of Covid cases in the US rose to 81.2 million with the death toll nearing one million.
But the biggest worry in the west is that China’s latest round of pandemic restrictions comes at a time when the global economy is under pressure from Russia’s war on Ukraine, surging energy prices, and lagging supply lines.
Chinese factories assemble most of the world’s smartphones and computers, as well as medical devices, appliances, and other goods, for global consumption. A one-month slowdown at Shenzhen’s Yantian Port last year caused a backlog of thousands of shipping containers and sent shockwaves through global supply chains.
“We can think of no risk to the global economy, excluding nuclear warfare, that is greater than the risk of a COVID outbreak in China that shutters industrial production,” said Carl B. Weinberg of High-Frequency Economics in a report. “Uncountable manufacturing supply chains pass through China.”
Two things come to mind from all this. The first is, no matter how the war in Ukraine ends, its ripple effect on the environment and on the global economy will be felt for years to come.
The second is that the US and its western alliance needs to rethink its aggressive cold war approach to China if for no other reason than externally imposed constraints of China’s productive capacity combined with the loss of Ukrainian grain and Russian energy, on top of a resurgent Covid pandemic, will lead to a global catastrophe of epic proportions.
That’s the Butterfly Effect in today’s world.