Since joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China has, barely without foreign notice, executed one of the most consequential economic strategies in modern history. When it entered the WTO, roughly 33 percent of Chinese exports were intermediate goods, or the components, chemicals, and parts that go into making final products. By 2025, that figure had risen to 46 percent.1 This did not happen by accident. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a deliberate strategic decision to, as it has framed it, make the world dependent on China while making China independent of the world.2 Supply chain supremacy was always intended as a geopolitical weapon.

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