Every once in awhile I see a small thing that makes me wonder if China is really thinking about war with the rest of us. In today's Wall Street Journal there is a story [in the on-line version it is a video] that talks about the nibs of ball point pens - hardly your typical war instrument. The point of the article was that China wants to build domestic industries for whole devices so the industries are self-sufficient and 100% Chinese, sometimes even a cost that does not make sense in a globalized environment talked about at Davos. OK, we can all believe that is true.
However, when the maker of those pens was questioned about why he would go to so much trouble to make nibs when Japan could make them for the same money and they were good quality, he gave all the usual reasons except one: "What if there is a war?"
So I asked myself how a large manufacturing company in China could have in his head that there might be a war and they might have reasons to think about that in the manufacturing of goods. It doesn't seem logical that this thought just popped into his head without any previous discussion of it among his friends and government leaders. Most people would just let it go as a misstatement or casual comment. Somehow, I doubt that it was. Too many people do not believe that China is a threat to anyone, particularly in the South China Sea. By the time we get around to doing anything about their threats to the trade routes, it will be too late and they will be the only ones making ball point pen nibs that don't have to transit that area. I'm kidding about the nibs, but not about the war. In the long run, we better start thinking about it. They want a fight.
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