She was a member and adviser to the co-chairs of the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs’ Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee. She has also served as the Senior Advisor for China and Asia to various Canadian Cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs, at different points between 2015 and 2021.
Massot applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, China's Vulnerability Paradox: How the World's Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets, and reported the following:
In China’s Vulnerability Paradox, on page 99 the reader will first find two pairs of pie charts. The first pair compares world shares of iron ore exports by country in 2000 and in 2015, drawing on data from UN Comtrade. What this shows is that whereas in 2000, the two top exporting nations, Brazil and Australia, accounted for 61% of global iron ore exports, in 2015, their share had increased to 75%. In other words, the global concentration of iron ore production (destined for the global market) had increased by 14% over the first 15 years of the 21st century. The second pair of pie charts compare China’s iron ore imports by country in 2001 and 2016. There too, the same trends show. Whereas in 2001 China was dependent on Brazil and Australia for 68% of its iron ore imports, that share had increased to 84% in 2016. China’s dependence on iron ore imports from Brazil and Australia has increased by 16% between 2001 and 2016.Visit Pascale Massot's website.
Next, the reader will find 5 lines of text indicating that the Big Three iron ore producers (BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Vale) are dominant in the global iron ore market, responsible for 60.6% of seaborne iron ore exports in 2017. Finally, the first sentence of the section entitled “Global Iron Ore Pricing Regime Prior to China’s Emergence” indicates that in the early 2000s, the global iron ore market was functioning under a negotiated benchmark pricing regime, which means that prices were the result of annual negotiations between the three largest iron ore exporters and the leading iron ore importers at the time, which were Japanese firms (but you have to look at page 100 to finish that sentence).
Offering, as it does, 4 pie charts to the reader, I feel like page 99 is a good snapshot of the nature of my book. With 24 tables and 48 figures in total, my book offers many (never before published in English) descriptive statistical illustrations of China’s domestic commodity markets, international commodity markets and of the former’s impact on the latter. In particular, it makes the use of comparative statistics, either across time or across markets to illustrate the distinctiveness of China’s impact on different global commodity markets, including that of iron ore, potash, uranium and copper.
In addition, page 99 sits at the start of the most important empirical chapter of the book, which covers China’s impact on the global iron ore market. In that way, it is representative of the book as well.
The written text on page 99 may only feature 4 (incomplete) sentences, yet those four sentences touch two critical components of the book. First, the importance of the concentration of market power (although it is not called that on page 99 itself) in the commodity markets China is import dependent on (and one might add, more generally as well). Second, the last two sentences of the text foreshadow one of the most fascinating, yet under covered event that resulted from Chinas’ dramatic rise in commodities consumption in the first decade of the 21st century: the fall of the iron ore benchmark pricing regime in 2010, a regime that had been established by Japanese consumers and had been stable for decades, prior to China’s rise.
While page 99 offers a useful window into the nature of this book, taken on its own, it would also skew the reader’s perception away from other, more conceptual contributions of the book. Among other things, I take some time in the book to characterize current China debates and their shortcomings, while offering novel ways to think about the China challenge. For instance, in the third chapter, in a section entitled “Building Blocks”, I introduce the concept of China as a heterogeneous power, one that shines a light on the concurrent variation in China’s behaviour abroad.
In the same section, I also delve into the notion of China’s vulnerability, one that I think is not sufficiently explored in the China literature. This is the paradox I explore in the book, that China, as dominant as it is economically, often finds itself in a position of market vulnerability vis-à-vis global market stakeholders. I find that, in some of the cases studied in the book, a position of market vulnerability can lead to disruptive behaviour by China on the global stage. More research is needed to specify the relationship between positions of vulnerability and more- or less- assertive behaviour.
In its conclusion, the book also offers reflections on the implications of this research for broader questions about the political economy of China’s rise. Among others, the importance of unintended consequences, the question of resonance between national systems of political economy and the global economy, the importance of market power in international economic dynamics or challenging the notion of open markets. At a time of deepening tensions between the U.S. and China, including on issues of global economic import, this book offers new pathways to think about the relationship between large states and global markets.
--Marshal Zeringue
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