China Plastics Industry Faces Reckoning as World Realizes It Depends on a Critical Import from US

For the most part, the story of the tariff war between China and the United States has been that, by ratcheting up the tariffs, China has far more to lose because it imports much less from the United States than the U.S. does from China.
And, this is generally true — but the tale of woe befalling China’s plastics industry shows that a slowdown in U.S. imports could put a major dent in their export trade, as well.
According to the Singapore Business Times, plastic factories across China might come to a halt as “[t]he world’s dominant plastics manufacturer” is now forced to go without a critical ingredient in production, which it mostly gets from the United States.

On Monday, Bloomberg noted that China’s purchases of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, dropped to zero in March — and the imports were frozen before the …