Freightdog wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 3:38 pm

CaptainCanuck wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 3:01 pm Will this include cutting edge pharma research or are animal rights too stringent in the West for the Fauci crowd ?

Who knows? Specific administrations aside, the bigger picture from my point of view is that far too many companies outsourced too great a proportion of their manufacturing, and further, they naively placed it in far too limited a location.
As an engineer (previously), I saw several companies do this, much to their detriment. This is not a new phenomenon, and so recriminations against a present incumbent for not fixing what several elected governments allowed to happen over the decades preceding would be wrong.
The article specifies US companies, and specifically those federally funded. But on a greater scale, a lot of capability and know how was outsourced in many sectors. Far too much to China. In the UK, such was the success of this that several companies simply ceased to exist as UK based businesses, except maybe from an admin/paperwork/registered office viewpoint. The manufacturing, technical, research staff either moved to other companies of their own volition, or they were subsequently made redundant. Either way, they vanished. The product remained, manufactured in the Far East, mainly.

All too frequently, the quality suffered. Equally, the subcontractor slowly became the ‘boss’, rather than the supplier, and eventually dictated future development and supply.
A sell out.

Towards the end of my engineering career, I was involved in several projects that were hampered by this control on product supply slowly being imposed by a region that was meant to be a supplier.
Again, significant naïveté on the part of the west, who realised short term financial gains, but something of a drain in the long term.

Later, very early in my aviation career, I saw elements of this affecting aviation. Supply of key small components being limited by a single manufacturer. It was remarkable that the source of an otherwise mundane semiconductor, (both by supplier, and manufacturing location) could have such an impact. All because there was only a very limited number of suppliers, and they might actually all be the same company. That was the case for a single computer on an aircraft built new nearly 20 years ago.
Imagine a whole production line of cars being manufactured, and completed, and then parked up, while the supply of a small chip held up production of the engine ECUs.

My engineering career was mainly electronics based, and then I moved permanently into aviation. I would find it very easy to believe that the same concerns as I had then are relevant to just about any industry. Bio, pharmaceuticals, agricultural, et al.

China was clever, I think, in capitalising on corporate greed.