Here’s the thing, supply chains have intermediate components and it’s almost certain that liberty phone will have these components in its supply chain as well.

The chart above is the key one. First look at the two bars on the left hand side. This is what conventional trade statistics tell you about the dominance of China as a supplier to American manufacturers: up from being the main provider of inputs to about 5% of sectors in 1995 to just over 60% in 2018. That’s pretty striking. But now look at the two bars on the right. These are the authors’ measure which includes all those intermediate inputs (a far more complex picture) and it turns out China is the main source of these goods for about 95% of all American industrial sectors.

One obvious takeaway from the paper: whoa, America is far more reliant on China than it thought. But actually this underplays the complexity. Think back to our Brandauer electrode. The chances are that it was made of metals which were originally refined in China (I’m guessing here, but given China is the world’s biggest metal refiner this is not implausible). Those metals were then shipped to the UK where they were turned into the micron-accurate electrodes I saw being turned out of the machines in Birmingham. Then they were shipped back to another factory, probably in China, where they were put inside a rear view mirror.

https://edconway.substack.com/p/globalisation-is-a-far-far-bigger