‘China is three moves ahead…’: CA decodes how India is being boxed out of global manufacturing

India isn’t just being outpaced, it’s being outplayed. Vivek Khatri, a chartered accountant and popular finfluencer, believes China is executing a quiet but devastating strategy to keep India out of the global manufacturing game. “No noise. No headlines. Just silent industrial chess,” he wrote on X. 

While India hosts summits and drafts policy documents, Beijing is redrawing the global supply chain map — calmly, surgically, and without firing a shot.

This isn’t trade. It’s industrial warfare in slow motion. And China, he warns, is already three moves ahead.

According to Khatri, China’s trillion-dollar trade surplus isn’t just an economic statistic—it’s a geopolitical tool. As global companies diversify supply chains under the “China Plus One” strategy, Beijing isn’t pushing back. 

Instead, it’s strategically guiding outbound investments toward countries like Hungary, Mexico, Morocco, Vietnam, and Indonesia. These destinations aren’t random. They quietly align with China, offer non-competing manufacturing ecosystems, and receive generous foreign direct investment in return, he adds.

India, on the other hand, is being deliberately left out. Khatri believes the reason is simple: India is the only country that could realistically replicate China’s manufacturing trajectory from the 1990s. And Beijing remembers what it took to build that dominance — it’s unwilling to let India repeat the playbook.

He claims China is actively starving India of critical industrial inputs such as EV parts, solar modules, and electronics manufacturing equipment. Expansion efforts by companies like Foxconn and BYD are being slowed. Chinese corporates are being discouraged from building India’s supply chain capacity. Even Apple, which is often touted as India’s electronics success story, is falling short of scale. 

Against a 25 percent global iPhone production target, India currently stands at around 15 percent—held back by strikes, delays, and inconsistent execution.

The data speaks for itself. Vietnam’s electronics exports stand at 126 billion dollars, while India’s trail behind at just 26 billion. Japanese and Taiwanese firms are also pulling back. 

Khatri notes that only one in ten Japanese companies exploring India actually invest, citing regulatory complexity, red tape, and a lack of execution certainty.

Meanwhile, China is exporting low-value manufacturing to partner nations while retaining core technologies and intellectual property. It is building long-term industrial corridors from Morocco to Mexico, quietly reshaping globalization to serve its strategic interests and contain India’s rise.

Khatri concludes that India still has a shot. A massive young workforce, a strong consumer market, and strategic Western alliances are all in its favour. But potential without execution is meaningless. He argues that India must urgently cut red tape, fast-track trade agreements, build true industrial clusters, strengthen port and rail infrastructure, and enforce serious intellectual property laws.

“India doesn’t need to become China,” he writes. “But it must stop playing policy catch-up and start executing with wartime urgency.”