But in recent years, Taiwan has been working to wean itself off Chinese sand, so that the construction of new homes, office towers, and factories isn’t at the mercy of Beijing’s export policy. Taiwan used to import much of its sand from China at one point, around 15 years ago, nearly 80% of all its sand imports came from China.

Sand-a key ingredient in the glass, concrete, mortars, and plasters used in many construction projects-has emerged as a small but contentious flashpoint in cross-strait relations. 5, when China levied unspecified sanctions on Pelosi personally, making her the highest-ranking US official ever penalized by Beijing.Īmong China’s retaliations against Taiwan, in the wake of Pelosi’s trip, was a strange one: a ban on sand exports to Taiwan.

(“If you cannot stand up for human rights in China because of commercial interests, you lose all moral authority to speak out for it in any place,” she said recently.) But the ultimate rupture came on Aug. Remarkably, Pelosi’s stance stayed firm even as the US grew more and more reliant on trade and investment links with China. To China, each of these counted as a deliberate poke in the eye. She has hobnobbed with the Dalai Lama, pressed Chinese leaders to release political dissidents from prison, called for boycotts of sporting events in China, and welcomed Hong Kong activists into the US Capitol. Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this past week is only the most recent episode in her decades of confrontations with China. “There is no way we could come here without being drawn to the square.” “Tiananmen Square is a magnet for us,” she said. She holds up flowers and a banner, until police hustle her and her colleagues away. It is 1991, and Nancy Pelosi, as part of a small American delegation, is at Tiananmen Square to honor the pro-democracy activists who’d died two years earlier. The video is grainy, but the steely voice is unmistakable. Finding immediate replacements for everything China offers to the world economy–a giant market, labor force, and pool of factories rolled into one–will be impossible. It has been hard enough finding immediate replacements for Russian oil and gas. Exports of rare earth metals and Taiwanese semiconductors, the hearts of all our modern digital devices, will grind to a near-halt. Supplies of manufactured goods out of China will seize up two-thirds of Chinese exports go to nations aligned with the US. Other countries would get shot up in the cross-fire as well. Foreign demand makes up around 15% of China’s GDP if other economies have to stop buying from China in the midst of a war, its citizens would face a long and difficult depression. A RAND Corporation report (pdf) estimated that a one-year war between the US and China would cut 5-10% off US GDP–and 25-35% off Chinese GDP. And if sanctions on Russian energy have roiled the economy, that level of chaos will only pale before a campaign to isolate China–or a Chinese campaign to isolate itself.

Modern warships and modern warplanes