In 2012, shortly before becoming China’s top leader, Xi Jinping visited the Port of Los Angeles to discuss boosting trade. What then looked like a locus of cooperation has now become another site for suspicion as Sino-American relations remain tense. Last month, the Biden administration announced $20bn of funding for port infrastructure, much of it to replace cargo cranes that have almost all been made by a state-owned Chinese firm. The US is concerned because the sophisticated pieces of equipment manage information about containers and their contents, their origins and their destinations – and can be remotely programmed and controlled. It wants to restart domestic production of the cranes, which have not been made in the US for decades.
The move comes amid a much broader economic rethinking: what the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, last year described as “a paradigm shift from the primacy of open markets to the primacy of security; from ‘just in time’ to ‘just in case’”. The pandemic was a wake-up call, forcing nations to scrutinise their supply chains, and ask whether they had sacrificed resilience for efficiency. The climate crisis is already affecting logistics: low rainfall in Panama has forced the authorities to limit vessels using the canal. Cyber-attacks by criminal actors are another concern. The Japanese port of Nagoya was put out of action by a ransomware attack last summer. But current conflicts and geopolitical divides are driving the changes.
