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History offers a useful warning here. The Opium Wars, and the Treaty of Nanjing forced on the Qing empire in their aftermath, grew out of a trade imbalance: British merchants bought ever-larger volumes of Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, while the Chinese administration refused to open its market to British goods in return. That refusal to rebalance trade eventually invited external coercion and national humiliation. China would do well to remember its own history and reform its economy toward genuine consumption of domestic and foreign goods and services, rather than repeating a one-sided trade posture that invites confrontation from the other direction this time.
China’s excess industrial capacity is one of the defining stress points in today’s global economy. Sustained state subsidies keep production running well beyond what domestic demand can absorb, flooding markets with underpriced exports — electric vehicles being the clearest example. Meanwhile, the domestic consumption story that was meant to eventually replace exports as the growth engine has failed to take off. Part of the explanation is the collapse of the real estate bubble and the failure of major developers like Evergrande, which wiped out a large share of household wealth in a country where property is the primary store of family savings. With that wealth eroded, the confidence needed for a consumption boom simply isn’t there. Layered on top is a declining demographic dividend, a direct legacy of the one-child policy. This is a structural imbalance, not a cyclical downturn.
That imbalance cannot persist indefinitely, because the world is increasingly unwilling to be the release valve. Tariffs, anti-dumping measures, and reshoring are narrowing the export channel that has partly compensated for weak domestic consumption. China is not taking this passively — it is already restricting access to critical minerals, rare earths, and the magnets used in military electronics and advanced manufacturing whenever markets move to impose tariffs on its goods. This signals an escalating exchange of trade restrictions and supply-chain leverage ahead, rather than a single rupture. As the rest of the world figures out solutions to their supply chain bottlenecks and China’s export channel narrows, the Chinese economy will come under real strain — and with it, the implicit social contract between the CCP and the population, resting on delivered prosperity rather than conventional legitimacy. When delivery falters, that legitimacy frays.
Regimes under this kind of pressure have a well-worn playbook: substitute nationalism for economic performance. Taiwan and the South China Sea maritime disputes are the most available vehicles for that mobilization — live grievances with deep historical resonance that can be escalated incrementally, well short of open war, while rallying domestic sentiment around an external threat rather than an internal failure. These flashpoints deserve attention now as leading indicators of internal economic stress, not just as standalone territorial disputes.
This is where the concern becomes very concrete for India. A significant share of India’s subsea cable infrastructure to the United States and Japan physically transits this exact theatre. In a crisis, China would not need open conflict to impose serious costs on India and the ASEAN states — deniable grey-zone interference with subsea cables is a low-cost, high-leverage way to deter support for Taiwan while staying below the threshold that triggers formal military response. Cables get cut by anchors and trawlers routinely in ordinary maritime traffic; deniability is built into the terrain.
The scale of what’s at stake is easy to underappreciate. India’s services economy — financial services, IT-BPM, and the broader data economy — depends on high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity to Western markets. A disruption to South China Sea cables would be a direct economic shock to exactly the sector that has been India’s most reliable source of high-value export earnings.
India doesn’t need to wait for this scenario before acting. Its relationship with Australia offers a credible alternative: routing bulk of India’s digital infrastructure through Australia and, from there, via Guam in the Pacific, directly to the United States and Japan — a path that avoids the South China Sea chokepoint entirely. Several existing and planned trans-Pacific systems already route through Guam for exactly this reason. What’s missing is not technical feasibility but strategic urgency.
There is also a regional opportunity here. India could extend access to this rerouted infrastructure to South Asian neighbours — Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and others — giving them a China-risk-free path to global connectivity through Indian and Australian landing points. This gives India a tangible way to deepen regional ties, at a time when China has been expanding its own regional influence through infrastructure financing.
It is time for India to treat undersea cable resilience as a first-order national security and economic priority, not an afterthought. The overcapacity story and the Taiwan/South China Sea flashpoint are causally linked, not parallel risks. Diversifying through Australia and Guam is not just good geopolitics — it is an imperative economic risk management.
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