As someone who spent 5 years in China pre-pandemic, China is a threat to many nations due to their growth. The Chinese govt. is specifically targeting key markets (EVs, solar, battery tech, steel, semiconductors) and China makes much more of those items that can be used internally in China. So China ends up driving any non-Chinese battery or solar panel manufacturer out of business.
If Chinese EVs were to be sold widely in the US, they would be less than half the cost of any Western-made EV and would take over the EV market. A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that's just not a future the US govt. wants- no govt. (outside of China's own) should want that.
Then there's the whole Fentanyl epidemic in the US and elsewhere. That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US. There are many to blame here but the US has been pushing China to ban the sale of these chemicals outside of China for a long time without agreement. China realizes this is important to the US and it's being used as a key trade issue.
"doubling down on liberal democracy" got us to where we are now wrt China. China doesn't respond to liberal democracy. They only respond to force or trade embargos, or tariffs. That's what was learned as Xi decided to become dictator for life.
> A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that's just not a future the US govt. wants
I agree, but why do cars need to send data to servers again? I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either. What's wrong with the alternative where we allow real competition that benefits everyone, and then ban any features (eg sending data to servers) that the government gets nervous about? I don't see how this is any different from the myriad of other requirements on cars (eg mandated safety belts etc etc etc).
I recognize that state-subsidised competition still isn't fair, so I support import tariffs that match those subsidies, but any further and you're just hurting competition and the consumer, right?
Thing is, super cheap EVs and solar panels is exactly what we should want. There's a climate crisis going on and these things are a big part of the solution. With climate goggles on, to put import tariffs on the tech that's gonna save the world sound batshit insane. We should want those tariffs to be as low as possible.
You're right that this isn't about data collection/privacy, though it would be a bit scary to have our nation's cars remotely shut off at the whims of a foreign government.
Instead, we want/need to be protectionist of our manufacturing industries so that if we were to go to war, we keep our ability to make more missiles, planes, tanks, etc.
> I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either.
User data is valuable[1], and storage is now so cheap, for a modest sum, one can keep data forever without deleting[2], so keeping car telemetry/videos has virtually no downsides.
1. For self-driving training, or selling to market researchers, or intelligence services. I'm not claiming this is what's being currently being done with the data, but how "value" can be extracted from it
> I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either.
> Thing is, super cheap EVs and solar panels is exactly what we should want.
It's plain to me how this can come into conflict with National Interest - no country wants cheap solar and EV at the cost of its own manufacturers going bankrupt (and losing the jobs that go with them going down the supply chain).
User data is valuable[1], storage is cheap, so keeping it has no downsides.
1. For self-driving training, or selling to market researchers, or intelligence services. I'm not claiming this is what's being currently being done with the data, but how "value" can be extracted from it
I dont see how that is true at all. The textile industry has completely left the western world and no one is complaining(other than the luddites I guess). Solar manufacturing isnt very different from textiles. Protectionism just leads to expensive goods, 95% of people gain under free trade.
So what's your mental model for the protectionism by the US against Chinese EVs and batteries despite the push for renewables by the same administration?
> The textile industry has completely left the western world and no one is complaining(other than the luddites I guess).
This was a very gradual process (over centuries), and they weren't really happy about it either. It wasn't just the Luddites who were upset when Samuel Slater (a.k.a. "Slater the traitor") left England and helped set up a competing textile industry in North America.
For self-preservation purposes, no politician will willingly sacrifice jobs at existing regional or national champions[1], regardless of how noble the goal is: politicians get voted out of office for far less. The best we can hope for, is a slow steady decline of harmful industries (see coal).
1. The US will treat Boeing with kid gloves rather than gift the market to Airbus, even though Boeing has a terrible safety culture and not exactly competing on merit. The same goes for VW in Germany, Arianespace in France, Samsung in Korea, Huawei in China, etc.
If the government just gave away money, and paid your salary, your employees salary, your rent, your purchase costs on manufacturing equipment costs, I'd find it hard to compete with you too, given than I'm not a billionaire and would need to raise capital from investors.
The narrative of 'data-privacy' being a threat is IMO a whole lot of simplist bait. The real thing at stake here is the vehicle manufacturing jobs that are being threatened, and the whole chain of high value jobs that come with it. People who lose their jobs lose faith in their governments. And countries losing a high value chain of goods/services isn't going to do well psychologically for them.
This [video](https://youtu.be/BQ23sgi_mgw?si=3HOm3WeWKO7VJMzr) called <Is China’s High-Tech ‘Overproduction’ Killing Jobs In The West?> from Channel NewsAsia covers it. Highly recommend you westerners to watch it; there's some really heavy handed defense/reasoning from the chinese side.
What if we lived in a world where Chinese are allowed to sell their cheap EVs but the government was actually on the side of the common man instead of corporate elites, and actually scrutinized anti-consumer totalitarian data collection, because its wrong, and anti-humanity on principle, and not because it's not controlled by them.
> That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US.
i say china is not at all responsible for the drug, except as a contract manufacturer. If china doesn't do it, somebody else would've. China just does it cheaply.
The drug problems come from the cartels, and from the fact that US's war on drugs makes drugs expensive, and thus profitable. There's no possibility of humans relinquishing drug use - think about the prohibition and the problems that it caused.
I say, just allow drugs to be manufactured, and sold (under license and regulation) in the US. It's gonna be like alcohol. This will take away the profits from the cartels, and they will stop buying from china. It will increase tax revenue, as drug consumption can be taxed (like tobacco today is).
It will also remove the stigma, and reduce drug enforcement costs in police. The only thing society has to give up is the moral high horse of drug use.
Are you sure drugs can be regulated the way alcohol can? They are both more addictive and behavior changing than alcohol. I don't have a solution as I also dislike the current "war" on drugs. But I suspect regulating safe fentanyl use will be way, way harder than regulating safe scotch use.
it doesn't have to be safe, just legal. If people choose it, and fuck themselves up, they're free to do so. They're doing it today already, but with the added benefit of being illegal and force resources into a drug war against the cartels.
When I was living in the USA I felt this way, but after moving to Japan, a country that is very strict on drugs and has eliminated it from the public consciousness, I feel my opinions changing. I trust myself to be able to use/not use drugs responsibly but given how irresponsible most people are, it’s undeniable the positive effects on society of NOT letting people totally destroy their brains and lives, and it is utterly daunting to think of what it would take to get the USA back on its feet re drugs.
We need the EV and solar transition to happen, and if the Chinese government wants to subsidize that we should let them.
> all of the American user data going back to servers in China
There's a long running argument with the EU over all EU user's data going back to the US where there are no privacy laws or protection against surveillance (US constitution only protects US nationals!), so the US government would have more credibility on this if it recognized that.
I can’t help but think this IP theft scare, while completely real, has a version in the Western US-led economics called ”big business” or ”VC money” or ”platform control”.
How many independent innovations get snatched (sherlocked?) by big business taking the idea and making their own version, when they see a small player that found a customer segment a large company never bothered investigating?
When large sums of money is what’s needed to execute any novel idea to full completion before your competitors can, that money becomes just a version of ”IP theft” or unfair competition. I think what they are getting is a taste of their own medicine.
EVs were a mature idea a decade+ ago, but big money oil companies hamstrung it and big money ICE manufacturers argued it was not worth their time or effort. The Chinese market and leaders knew the fundamentals were valid and cornered the entire manufacturing market before it could be cornered by western companies.
Honestly, it's wild that the US hasn't invested heavily into green energy for the past couple of decades. They could've been in an extremely strong position of selling the tech which all countries need to transition their energy sectors. But instead they've ... fought it? And let China and other countries outside of their hegemony eat their lunch? Why?
The oil industry (eg. Koch) has spent a fortune in lobbying and their ideological allies that want to maintain the status quo have spent enormous amounts of money and effort in spreading FUD around shifting away from an oil based economy.
I really think it’s much less insidious than you are making it out to be. Fracking means America has access to cheap natural gas so no one has worried about energy security in the last two decades so few are pushing for green energy subsidies. This is just politicians doing what their constituents want. China on the other hand has extremely limited oil so green tech has been a top national security priority.
It is the money and lobbying that results in the imbalance in information and an imbalance in what "the constituents want."
Absolutely constituents want jobs and cheap energy. I bet they also don't want the wild salmon they eat to go extinct too. On balance they're hearing about the former and not the latter.
> "doubling down on liberal democracy" got us to where we are now wrt China.
Banning all the paths to growth got the US to where it is now. Everything China did to out-compete the US was illegal in the US - the working conditions wouldn't have passed muster, the environmental damage wouldn't have been acceptable, the investment in cheap energy was off the agenda and the focus on heavy industry was broadly against the policy position which focused on financialisation and growing service industries.
We can argue until the cows come home which policies were the important ones (it is clear that some of what China does is counterproductive) but a key factor was legislative restrictions in the West. That is the opposite of the liberal part of liberal democracy. A key part of liberalism is giving people freedom to better their own lives.
Still it is up to western companies to prove that they aren’t inferior to Chinese ones. Tariffs and trade barriers will buy time but if western companies physically cannot approach the scale or cost effectiveness of Chinese industry then there are serious structural problems in our liberal system.
I mean I'm Chinese, and the number of Americans with rose tinted glasses on China because "america bad" is insane. The real thing China does far better than the US, is having an understanding of how the US works and how to target Americans and American corporations with the right incentives. Americans on average almost know nothing about what the real China is like, and have a general disinterest in other countries and global affairs, and overlook the much suffering and abuse there is on a societal scale. I don't disagree with OP that the US needs to double down on improving social standards as a whole, but policymakers need to think hard about potential abuse from the Chinese side, especially when the economy is just a wheel driven by the political cart. The incentives don't align that neatly in the US, and coordination is hard.
If Chinese EVs were to be sold widely in the US, they would be less than half the cost of any Western-made EV and would take over the EV market. A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that's just not a future the US govt. wants- no govt. (outside of China's own) should want that.
Then there's the whole Fentanyl epidemic in the US and elsewhere. That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US. There are many to blame here but the US has been pushing China to ban the sale of these chemicals outside of China for a long time without agreement. China realizes this is important to the US and it's being used as a key trade issue.
"doubling down on liberal democracy" got us to where we are now wrt China. China doesn't respond to liberal democracy. They only respond to force or trade embargos, or tariffs. That's what was learned as Xi decided to become dictator for life.