Foreign trade security

US dependence on Chinese imports posing potential threat on national security, think tank says

A new report by a British think tank shows that the U.S. is strategically dependent on China for 414 categories of imports, of which 114 service its critical national infrastructure -- and in some cases, these could pose a national security risk.

China has steadily increased its share of many markets over the years under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of President Xi Jinping, who has made clear his ambitions for global dominance

Today, the U.S. is strategically dependent on China for antibiotics, including penicillin and chloramphenicol; essential batteries including lithium; rare earth metals and critical elements like tungsten; vitamin supplements and even shipping containers, as well as safety glass, laptops, cell phones, life jackets and anchors.

Strategic Dependency is defined here as when "[a] country is a net importer of a particular good; it imports more than 50 percent of its supplies from China, and China controls more than 30 percent of the global market of that particular good," according to the report.

As China continues to bully economies, Matthew Henderson -- director of the Asia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society, and one of the authors of the report -- said that to turn this around requires a "decoupling" of the U.S. and Chinese economy and the forming of new partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region.