There are news stories that make the front page, there are news stories that make the business page, and there are news stories that aren’t covered at all.

Then there are the stories that are only news to an interest group so severely limited that they are exclusively covered in narrow trade journals, and never make it to the mainstream press at all, though sometimes, perhaps, they should.

People in the transportation business, for example, might have noticed a big news story out of northwest Africa last week — the New Year’s Eve announcement that a Chinese heavy equipment contractor had been selected to supply the bulk cargo handling equipment for a port expansion at the port of Safi, Morocco.

This contract, awarded by the Moroccan state-owned fertilizer giant OCP Group to the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, is for a total of 2.05 billion in Chinese money, approximately $200 million in U.S. dollars

This doesn’t sound like a big story, even for the construction industry, when you consider that most Americans will never set foot in Morocco, and most businesses ship internationally using intermodal containers, so even our international traders aren’t likely to encounter this bulk handling service at the distant port of Safi.

But let’s change the context and look instead at a different picture.

In recent years, even outside the arena of presidential politics, Americans have begun to worry about the way that Mainland China (yes, the one that some still remember to call Red China) has been expanding its global reach.

We Americans tend to be frustrated or concerned at the number of American businesses who have switched their manufacturing to China over the years. And those who think about military readiness are especially concerned by our dependence on China for the many national security related goods that we really ought to be making ourselves.

But the Chinese government hasn’t only been directing their commercial rivalry toward the United States. At the same time, China has been working to dominate an array of different industries, so that most other countries, both developed and undeveloped, would become just as dependent on China as we are.

Mexico, Canada, and Brazil import an enormous amount of components from China. When you buy a product labeled “made in........

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