Tbh the general decrease in car tariffs and shrinking of the automotive base made that an inevitability, let's not act like 2013 wasn't the logical result of a bipartisan, long term position
Thriving is... heavily dependent on which company. GWM, SAIC and to an extent Chery are doing fine to very well. Xpeng might do okay too, they just haven't been here long enough to know. BYD is doing well but their former distributor were moronic, so they're probably not at their full potential (servicing at KMart, really???)
Leapmotor and JAC seem to be doing fairly poorly though, and "well" outside of EVs is still not dominant marketshare. They're certainly a PART of the market but people clearly aren't seeing Chinese cars as quantitatively better like the article claims they should.
This article is acting like the three biggest sellers in Australia aren't Japanese, American and Japanese owned. Even MG doesn't expect to be top 3 until the end of this decade (which imo is optimistic but hey, what company isn't?) Chinese cars are a part of the car market, but only a part.
And plenty other grants and loans and concessions given to US auto industry over the century. Look dude, it aint a bad thing to have your industry subsidised, all major powers have a vested interest in having their vehicle manufacturing intact (esp for war) . But its disingenious to claim only china does it when plenty of others do it
Doesnt matter, the question was subsidised, besides it dont make much difference. The US politicians all have major stakes in the automotive industry which effectively make them state owned indirectly, so much so that they cant let these companies go bust, thus the bailouts, concessions and grants
Private enterprises cannot be in the same market as the state enterprises and expect to survive, since they operate under different boundary conditions.
Chinese firms entering the free market is like a new team joining a soccer league but this team’s players handle the ball with hands. When objections are raised, they keep insisting that ball handling is a unique innovation that only they can use.
Well, other teams have 3 choices. Keep playing as they have and keep losing. Or start playing like the new cheating team, in which case this is no longer a soccer league. Or they can ban the new team from playing.
This isn't true at all. These are not state owned enterprises. Typical state owned enterprises make shit products cuz there is no competition. The Chinese automakers are another beast altogether. They've mastered supply chain and have fully vertically integrated, that's their secret sauce
Vertical integration! Dang why didn't all of the other century old globally successful manufacturers think of that one. Those clever Chinese startup companies who didn't exist a decade ago and are now completely vertical integrated with optimized supply chains. Darn their superior planning! Oh wait, or maybe you're fucking dumb and that is the exact result of state planning, subsidization, and orchestration that you're convened "isn't true at all." Hmmm. No it's probably that they're just smarter than everyone.
China is the largest and most successful because it has had 4 decades of America pumping complex manufacturing tasks and capital into it. Notice how their most 'threatening' new industries are consumer electronics (Apple) and EVs (Tesla)?
Notice how their internal combustion industry was laughable dog shit? Almost like America and the west did't export any of it's drivetrain manufacturing there.
Yes well the point is it isn’t really possible to do what they did here. They were basically paid to scale and solve manufacturing issues by the west, now they’re using that momentum to their advantage. They were funded by our dollars and IP. People act like we don’t want their products because we’re “afraid” of them but the elephant in the room is we don’t really want our IP and manufacturing capacity sold back to us at the expense of our own homegrown companies.
Because the Chinese have 1 billion people back home and they can afford to make masisve production runs, causing economy of scale to bring down prices to 60-70% of their competitors and still manage a great profit margin.
Japan's JDM have been on the decline due to a weakening local market and reliance on foreign sales.
Except the US citizen's average purchasing power has never recovered siince the 90s and the 2008 crash pretty much turned prices up on their heads with housing being pretty much unattainable for record percentages of the working class based off PPP vs Median Property Prices/Land Prices divided by median wages.
Because of that and other strains, America has one the largest 2nd hand car markets in the world. China's PPP is on the rise still and they have presently the most ectensive and robust EV and non-vehicular infrastructure in the world so its impressive that their gas car sales have still reached such a level.
Except the US citizen's average purchasing power has never recovered since the 90s
how so? what metric are you using to be able to say this?
and I don't think it's sound to use nationwide metrics like ppp vs median residential property selling price when housing and income varies so much across the country, and even with record low home ownership rates for young adults, the united states is still miles ahead of most of the world in terms of being able to develop tech like consumer ev's. you completely missed my point which was that the same way you are using china's advantages as an excuse for america's failure to capture the ev market early on, the rest of the world could also use america's exorbitant advantages as the wealthiest most technologically advanced country in the world as an excuse for their shortcomings.
no, the us has always had a large used vehicle market. this phenomenon did not begin because of lack of purchasing power, didn't the us still have one of the largest used vehicle markets in the world when home price to median household income ratio was the lowest in the early 70's?
even with china's comparative advantages, the us has no excuse for not being ahead in the ev realm other than sheer incompetence from the government and the chokehold the petroleum industries have on our society.
Look at consumption per capita. Of power, goods, and services. It’s up across the board, by huge margins, from where it was in 2008, none the less the 90s. So evidently, people are purchasing more than that metric is accounting for.
Japan's JDM have been on the decline due to a weakening local market and reliance on foreign sales
It's part of arguments in tariff negotiation between America and Japan now.
Japanese car market doesn't make profitable for foreign automakers. The real reason isn't about Japanese buying their domestic automakers most, the car market in Japan is actually small. You don't wonder why Western automakers not offering their favorite Kei Car because of it.
Exactly what i mean. Japan's demographic wasnt exactly massive in the first place and itsdependent on foreign sales. The Japanese also typically dont mind used cars, so its kinda hard to reclaim the sales figures they had during their roaring 90s.
And yep, im aware of why Kei cars arent really being sold in the US outside of cultural preference, plus why Ford and other American manufacturers have been making their cars more bloated. Its kind of a tricky use of truck and car definitions that stop foreign cars like Japan's taling over.
The chicken tax is one of the things I mean. The other is CAFE. It wasnt meant to target Japanese trucks specifically, but they never moved away from it to protect local business when it looked like the Japanese could compete.
Also, yes, inspite of their strict regulations, Japanese car sales have been a steady 30 something percent of 2nd hand for years now.
This article comes across as Comminist anticapitalist propaganda. For example:
The irony that capitalist markets have blocked access to the ‘communist’ Chinese does not escape me. In a free market, everyone is allowed to sell their product without discrimination, but in Europe and America, when things get tough and the competition is better and cheaper, they close the market down.
It’s not ironic. It’s retaliatory because of the market manipulation as well as China’s own hurdles that the author literally admits to in this article. For some reason he is arguing that Chinese automakers should freely be able to sell in Western countries when he admits in the same breath that the inverse isn’t allowed.
For some reason he is arguing that Chinese automakers should freely be able to sell in Western countries when he admits in the same breath that the inverse isn’t allowed.
Reminder that Volkswagen is currently the #2 OEM in China, and that Toyota is the #3 OEM. Reminder that Tesla operates its own wholly-owned factory in China, and that Lexus is currently building one.
The idea that Western brands aren't allowed to sell in China (or that the article is even 'admitting' this in any fashion) is itself ironically clear-cut manipulative anti-communist propaganda: There are no limits on western companies to the degree you're suggesting whatsoever. The most onerous restrictions are all placed on Chinese companies by the USA, not the reverse.
For some reason, most American are blind to the fact that their American owners made those agreements voluntarily because it was most profitable for them to do so.
Ya they always had the chosen not to do business in China, no body forced them to setup shop there. The Chinese said, hey, if you wanna use our cheap labor, let us in on some of that tech!
Let's start with the basics here: Tesla owns 100% of its operations in China. It does not run a joint venture. It does not have partial ownership.
Lexus' new factory in Shanghai is operating in the exact same way. Chinese joint venture requirements were phased out years ago — they do not exist.
Moreover, if reciprocal joint-venture hand-shaking was all it took, everything be fine. Easy peasy. The reality is, joint venture deals make sense. However, when Ford attempted a joint-venture operation with China's CATL in Virginia, that project was rejected by US officials as being a "front for the Chinese Communist Party."
Again, the asymmetry is clear. Plain as day. Like the previous commenter, all you're doing here is spreading your own brand of one-sided propaganda rife with errors and creative framing.
You can make as many excuses as you like, chalk it up to reductive dog-whistle accusations of 'theft', or use the same coded McCarthyist language US officials have used for decades. In the real world, American companies have largely been embraced in China, whereas Chinese companies are overwhelmingly rebuffed and persecuted in the US. Simple as that.
"American companies have largely been embraced in China, whereas Chinese companies are overwhelmingly rebuffed and persecuted in the US. Simple as that."
Hmmm, I wonder why Tesla got special treatment as an EV company at that SPECIFIC point in time
They didn't get special treatment at all: Joint venture rules were removed not only across the entire automotive industry, but across multiple industries. That initiative started well before Tesla expressed any interest in the Chinese market whatsoever.
There's a problem alleged to exist in capitalism, and for which Hayek got the Nobel prize: there was an idea that with central planning as was done by the Soviet union there was no regulatory mechanism in the form of prices ensuring that you can calculate how dear different products were, so that you in a complex economy can't allocate resources effectively. He was completely right.
The problem is that we have this problem in capitalism too, due to things like middlemen and lack of competition. This means that we are paying 10-20x what we should for sneakers, that people go without them even though the price should be something trivial, it means that you can only buy synthetic crystals from Kyocera if you have a deal with them, even though they're not really that special.
China has somehow been able to keep closer to physical reality, probably because it's been directly involved in mass-producing goods, whereas we in the west have been living in this unreality where the prices are wrong and where we have the same problem as the Soviet union did-- i.e. economic calculations are wrong because the prices are wrong.
In the USSR the problem wasn't just price distortion — it was that planners didn't have the information feedback loop needed to know whether steel should go into a car, a rail, or a pipe, because prices weren't responsive to actual markets.
That doesn't actually exist in a hypothetical 'pure' free market. Yes, physical goods like sneakers might pass through a middleman layer, but that doesn't mean information isn't passing across the layers, or that the economy isn't able to rationally allocate resources to sneaker production, or that producers are specifically cut off from input costs, or that any of this implies higher costs at all. In fact, in a free market, those layers notionally exist specifically because they reduce costs.
It is with noting that direct-to-consumer models exist pretty much everywhere, and pretty much everywhere, they compete with the middleman approach to no clear discernable advantage: Nike will sell you shoes directly on their website and yet still sells them at the local Foot Locker, too.
Without strong competition and new entrants on markets, you do not get prices that can be used for economic calculation.
The problem isn't only middlemen, it's also entrenched systems integrators.
There are products that you simply buy in the west without partnerships with specific companies because a small group of companies have the whole production chain locked down. This is especially obvious when it comes to synthetic crystals.
Without strong competition and new entrants on markets, you do not get prices that can be used for economic calculation. Even the sneaker thing has prices that are off by 10-20x.
New-entrant D2C shoe brands exist by the bucketloads. Vessi, Allbirds, Rothys, Atoms and Soludos are all out there waiting for you to make your purchase, just to name a few. Amazon will feed you a hundred more from the Chinese brands themselves. You're going to have a hard time demonstrating a lack of competition or new entrants in the sneaker market.
This means that we are paying 10-20x what we should for sneakers
You can just google ‘cheap sneakers’ and find some for $30. The existence of luxury goods at higher price points isn’t a problem, you don’t have to buy them if you don’t care.
That’s not the main problem. The US car industry is heavily subsidized/politicized too. Maybe even more than China, especially if you consider gas…
Imagine a country where it is illegal to compare the president to Winnie the Pooh. Now this country controls the world’s critical assembly and supply chains for vehicles and chips.
There's been a definite downturn in individual posters - I'm not on the mod side so I don't know if more mod actions have been taken since the API blackout or not, but it definitely feels like there's just less original traffic.
I can't think of any Chinese products that I want, or that anyone in America gives a shit about? Is DJI the drone company Chinese? That might be the sole exception? Or maybe TikTok?
China has yet to "crack the code" on making desirable products that the west wants to buy. They are experts at producing "eerily similar" products already pioneered by western companies and improving on their specs (Apple, Tesla, etc), but beyond that, their products have yet to be perceived as "cool."
Where the Chinese differ from the Japanese is their willingness to hire and bring in foreign experts – paying them huge sums of money – to improve their products. To really make a point, think about how many Western car brands the Japanese have bought versus how many the Chinese own?
So, Japanese don't hire and bring in foreign experts, are you kidding ?
I don't think it's a strong point, and they're very clumsily throwing Japan into the mix, but there's a tiny thread of truth there. You just have to take a long trip to connect the dots and spend an hour taking about brands like Kuka and IDRA and systemic complexities like how SOEs are defacto union efforts, and unfortunately the article isn't putting the leg work in to get there.
I think mostly, it falls apart as a narrative mostly when you remember f.ex how much involvement Softbank has in the Chinese economy, or how much Apple has cross-pollinated with Foxconn, or that Toyota runs a JV with BYD, or how Volkswagen has bought into Xpeng.
I mean the whole article is very bad. Asian automakers do hire and use foreign experts. Specially, Korean has hired most experts from German automakers, and their experts are exactly Europeans.
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WhatAreYouSaying05@reddit
Jumping the gun a bit aren’t we? China can’t even sell their EVs in most western countries
Perth_R34@reddit (OP)
This is an Australian article, and they’re thriving here.
CorrectCombination11@reddit
I didn't realize that Aus represented the entirety of the West.
Perth_R34@reddit (OP)
It does represent what would happen if other western markets opened up.
Australia also has one of the most diverse and competitive vehicle markets.
Companies use Australia as a testing ground for other western markets, so yes it does represent it.
mgobla@reddit
All factories in you country closed and all auto workers lost their jobs. AU proves that other countries should not open up.
Perth_R34@reddit (OP)
Due to American companies taking profits and government subsidies back to America, rather than investing in Australia.
If GM-Holden and Ford didn’t close, we’d still have Toyota. Toyota didn’t want to leave.
Thomas_633_Mk2@reddit
Tbh the general decrease in car tariffs and shrinking of the automotive base made that an inevitability, let's not act like 2013 wasn't the logical result of a bipartisan, long term position
speedypotatoo@reddit
American car companies couldn't compete. Aussies don't need these shit companies anyways
CorrectCombination11@reddit
Want to peer into your crystal ball and let us know how likely that is in the next 5 to 10 years?
Cheap-Play-80@reddit
Nor is the US and Canada the entirety of the West.
Mojave_Idiot@reddit
Then maybe “The West” isn’t the greatest phrase to choose?
Cheap-Play-80@reddit
I mean, I expect absolutely nothing from most journalists.
Legacy auto maybe?
Mojave_Idiot@reddit
Bro just read.
Thomas_633_Mk2@reddit
Thriving is... heavily dependent on which company. GWM, SAIC and to an extent Chery are doing fine to very well. Xpeng might do okay too, they just haven't been here long enough to know. BYD is doing well but their former distributor were moronic, so they're probably not at their full potential (servicing at KMart, really???)
Leapmotor and JAC seem to be doing fairly poorly though, and "well" outside of EVs is still not dominant marketshare. They're certainly a PART of the market but people clearly aren't seeing Chinese cars as quantitatively better like the article claims they should.
This article is acting like the three biggest sellers in Australia aren't Japanese, American and Japanese owned. Even MG doesn't expect to be top 3 until the end of this decade (which imo is optimistic but hey, what company isn't?) Chinese cars are a part of the car market, but only a part.
DetroitLionsEh@reddit
Yeah, because if those countries allowed them to it would decimate their local auto industry
Twin_Turbo@reddit
Because their government pays the cost for them to be cheap as shit to cripple other countries manufacturing, weakening other countries.
Cautious-Question606@reddit
As if USA dont subsidise their auto industry
Mojave_Idiot@reddit
Dude by your very loose use of the term subsidize the US also subsidizes its military and post office.
Cautious-Question606@reddit
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-offers-12-billion-automakers-suppliers-make-advanced-vehicles-2023-08-31/
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/19/bush-bails-out-us-automakers-dec-19-2008-1066932
And plenty other grants and loans and concessions given to US auto industry over the century. Look dude, it aint a bad thing to have your industry subsidised, all major powers have a vested interest in having their vehicle manufacturing intact (esp for war) . But its disingenious to claim only china does it when plenty of others do it
Mojave_Idiot@reddit
I hate to explain the joke but many Chinese car companies are wholly state owned. Not subsidized, owned.
This list does not include BYD but they ultimately have to play the game in the absolutely brutal race to the bottom price war this creates.
Cautious-Question606@reddit
Doesnt matter, the question was subsidised, besides it dont make much difference. The US politicians all have major stakes in the automotive industry which effectively make them state owned indirectly, so much so that they cant let these companies go bust, thus the bailouts, concessions and grants
Mojave_Idiot@reddit
I don’t think you have a very thorough understanding of the conversation at hand. That’s ok.
Cautious-Question606@reddit
I dont think you do either, so its ok
Fearless_Neat_6654@reddit
GM bailed out taxpayers, many think it was the other way around 😡
Cautious-Question606@reddit
Really? Source?
linjun_halida@reddit
By the way, GM build cars in China and sell them in US before.
Cautious-Question606@reddit
I guess
V8-Turbo-Hybrid@reddit
GM still does some bad business managements, but GM is better than before chapter 11. Their EV plans does successful.
Cautious-Question606@reddit
Source? For the aforementioned bailing out taxpayer?
WhatAreYouSaying05@reddit
Which is why they will never be allowed in
Cheap-Play-80@reddit
They absolutely can. Only the US and Canada don't have Chinese EV's.
angrycanuck@reddit
Anywhere they are allowed in, they thrive, even if there is a premium attached from the government.
Skeptical0ptimist@reddit
Private enterprises cannot be in the same market as the state enterprises and expect to survive, since they operate under different boundary conditions.
Chinese firms entering the free market is like a new team joining a soccer league but this team’s players handle the ball with hands. When objections are raised, they keep insisting that ball handling is a unique innovation that only they can use.
Well, other teams have 3 choices. Keep playing as they have and keep losing. Or start playing like the new cheating team, in which case this is no longer a soccer league. Or they can ban the new team from playing.
speedypotatoo@reddit
This isn't true at all. These are not state owned enterprises. Typical state owned enterprises make shit products cuz there is no competition. The Chinese automakers are another beast altogether. They've mastered supply chain and have fully vertically integrated, that's their secret sauce
Available_Win5204@reddit
Vertical integration! Dang why didn't all of the other century old globally successful manufacturers think of that one. Those clever Chinese startup companies who didn't exist a decade ago and are now completely vertical integrated with optimized supply chains. Darn their superior planning! Oh wait, or maybe you're fucking dumb and that is the exact result of state planning, subsidization, and orchestration that you're convened "isn't true at all." Hmmm. No it's probably that they're just smarter than everyone.
speedypotatoo@reddit
Why is china the only country with successful state owned enterprises according to you
Available_Win5204@reddit
China is the largest and most successful because it has had 4 decades of America pumping complex manufacturing tasks and capital into it. Notice how their most 'threatening' new industries are consumer electronics (Apple) and EVs (Tesla)?
Notice how their internal combustion industry was laughable dog shit? Almost like America and the west did't export any of it's drivetrain manufacturing there.
speedypotatoo@reddit
China aggressively learned and scaled while he west sat on it's laurels. Now it's the leader in battery tech and advanced manufacturing.
Available_Win5204@reddit
Yes well the point is it isn’t really possible to do what they did here. They were basically paid to scale and solve manufacturing issues by the west, now they’re using that momentum to their advantage. They were funded by our dollars and IP. People act like we don’t want their products because we’re “afraid” of them but the elephant in the room is we don’t really want our IP and manufacturing capacity sold back to us at the expense of our own homegrown companies.
mgobla@reddit
How is this post not against the rulse?
verdegrrl@reddit
We're blocking politics while trying to allow policy discussion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/wiki/politics
sandwihc@reddit
cat reaction
sandwihc@reddit
cat reaction
Clouds_Hide_The_Moon@reddit
Because the Chinese have 1 billion people back home and they can afford to make masisve production runs, causing economy of scale to bring down prices to 60-70% of their competitors and still manage a great profit margin.
Japan's JDM have been on the decline due to a weakening local market and reliance on foreign sales.
Electrical_Top656@reddit
the rest of the world could say the same about the 340 million Americans living in the wealthiest most technologically advanced country in the world
Clouds_Hide_The_Moon@reddit
Except the US citizen's average purchasing power has never recovered siince the 90s and the 2008 crash pretty much turned prices up on their heads with housing being pretty much unattainable for record percentages of the working class based off PPP vs Median Property Prices/Land Prices divided by median wages.
Because of that and other strains, America has one the largest 2nd hand car markets in the world. China's PPP is on the rise still and they have presently the most ectensive and robust EV and non-vehicular infrastructure in the world so its impressive that their gas car sales have still reached such a level.
Electrical_Top656@reddit
how so? what metric are you using to be able to say this?
and I don't think it's sound to use nationwide metrics like ppp vs median residential property selling price when housing and income varies so much across the country, and even with record low home ownership rates for young adults, the united states is still miles ahead of most of the world in terms of being able to develop tech like consumer ev's. you completely missed my point which was that the same way you are using china's advantages as an excuse for america's failure to capture the ev market early on, the rest of the world could also use america's exorbitant advantages as the wealthiest most technologically advanced country in the world as an excuse for their shortcomings.
no, the us has always had a large used vehicle market. this phenomenon did not begin because of lack of purchasing power, didn't the us still have one of the largest used vehicle markets in the world when home price to median household income ratio was the lowest in the early 70's?
even with china's comparative advantages, the us has no excuse for not being ahead in the ev realm other than sheer incompetence from the government and the chokehold the petroleum industries have on our society.
King-of-redditors@reddit
Ppp is a horribly flawed metric
Clouds_Hide_The_Moon@reddit
Why? Its literally purchasing power.
Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho@reddit
Look at consumption per capita. Of power, goods, and services. It’s up across the board, by huge margins, from where it was in 2008, none the less the 90s. So evidently, people are purchasing more than that metric is accounting for.
V8-Turbo-Hybrid@reddit
It's part of arguments in tariff negotiation between America and Japan now.
Japanese car market doesn't make profitable for foreign automakers. The real reason isn't about Japanese buying their domestic automakers most, the car market in Japan is actually small. You don't wonder why Western automakers not offering their favorite Kei Car because of it.
Clouds_Hide_The_Moon@reddit
Exactly what i mean. Japan's demographic wasnt exactly massive in the first place and itsdependent on foreign sales. The Japanese also typically dont mind used cars, so its kinda hard to reclaim the sales figures they had during their roaring 90s.
And yep, im aware of why Kei cars arent really being sold in the US outside of cultural preference, plus why Ford and other American manufacturers have been making their cars more bloated. Its kind of a tricky use of truck and car definitions that stop foreign cars like Japan's taling over.
Recoil42@reddit
Japan has some of the most onerous used car regulations and one of the largest used car export industries on the planet.
You're on the wrong track here too — chicken tax is what caused that.
Clouds_Hide_The_Moon@reddit
The chicken tax is one of the things I mean. The other is CAFE. It wasnt meant to target Japanese trucks specifically, but they never moved away from it to protect local business when it looked like the Japanese could compete.
Also, yes, inspite of their strict regulations, Japanese car sales have been a steady 30 something percent of 2nd hand for years now.
agjios@reddit
This article comes across as Comminist anticapitalist propaganda. For example:
It’s not ironic. It’s retaliatory because of the market manipulation as well as China’s own hurdles that the author literally admits to in this article. For some reason he is arguing that Chinese automakers should freely be able to sell in Western countries when he admits in the same breath that the inverse isn’t allowed.
Recoil42@reddit
Reminder that Volkswagen is currently the #2 OEM in China, and that Toyota is the #3 OEM. Reminder that Tesla operates its own wholly-owned factory in China, and that Lexus is currently building one.
The idea that Western brands aren't allowed to sell in China (or that the article is even 'admitting' this in any fashion) is itself ironically clear-cut manipulative anti-communist propaganda: There are no limits on western companies to the degree you're suggesting whatsoever. The most onerous restrictions are all placed on Chinese companies by the USA, not the reverse.
King-of-redditors@reddit
Reminder they own 49% of their own company in China, with forced tech transfer
speedypotatoo@reddit
The transfer isn't forced, they agreed to it
Legitimate-Type4387@reddit
For some reason, most American are blind to the fact that their American owners made those agreements voluntarily because it was most profitable for them to do so.
In their minds somehow China made them do it.
speedypotatoo@reddit
Ya they always had the chosen not to do business in China, no body forced them to setup shop there. The Chinese said, hey, if you wanna use our cheap labor, let us in on some of that tech!
Recoil42@reddit
Let's start with the basics here: Tesla owns 100% of its operations in China. It does not run a joint venture. It does not have partial ownership.
Lexus' new factory in Shanghai is operating in the exact same way. Chinese joint venture requirements were phased out years ago — they do not exist.
Moreover, if reciprocal joint-venture hand-shaking was all it took, everything be fine. Easy peasy. The reality is, joint venture deals make sense. However, when Ford attempted a joint-venture operation with China's CATL in Virginia, that project was rejected by US officials as being a "front for the Chinese Communist Party."
Again, the asymmetry is clear. Plain as day. Like the previous commenter, all you're doing here is spreading your own brand of one-sided propaganda rife with errors and creative framing.
You can make as many excuses as you like, chalk it up to reductive dog-whistle accusations of 'theft', or use the same coded McCarthyist language US officials have used for decades. In the real world, American companies have largely been embraced in China, whereas Chinese companies are overwhelmingly rebuffed and persecuted in the US. Simple as that.
Educational_Age_1333@reddit
"American companies have largely been embraced in China, whereas Chinese companies are overwhelmingly rebuffed and persecuted in the US. Simple as that."
Oh, come on. 🙄
Cheap-Play-80@reddit
I can buy a Buick, Cadillac, Ford or Jeep in China.
Can I buy a BYD, Geely or Haval in America?
Educational_Age_1333@reddit
Not being available is persecution?
Recoil42@reddit
Killing joint ventures with pretty clear anti-communist dogwhistling is persecution.
McCarthyism never left; there's still a spectre haunting Washington.
Cheap-Play-80@reddit
Not a persecution as such, but one is more restrictive than the other and it isn't China.
King-of-redditors@reddit
So you singled out Tesla and made it as the rule, not the exception. “Simple as that” def not a bad faith argument
Recoil42@reddit
They didn't get special treatment at all: Joint venture rules were removed not only across the entire automotive industry, but across multiple industries. That initiative started well before Tesla expressed any interest in the Chinese market whatsoever.
impossiblefork@reddit
There's a problem alleged to exist in capitalism, and for which Hayek got the Nobel prize: there was an idea that with central planning as was done by the Soviet union there was no regulatory mechanism in the form of prices ensuring that you can calculate how dear different products were, so that you in a complex economy can't allocate resources effectively. He was completely right.
The problem is that we have this problem in capitalism too, due to things like middlemen and lack of competition. This means that we are paying 10-20x what we should for sneakers, that people go without them even though the price should be something trivial, it means that you can only buy synthetic crystals from Kyocera if you have a deal with them, even though they're not really that special.
China has somehow been able to keep closer to physical reality, probably because it's been directly involved in mass-producing goods, whereas we in the west have been living in this unreality where the prices are wrong and where we have the same problem as the Soviet union did-- i.e. economic calculations are wrong because the prices are wrong.
Recoil42@reddit
In the USSR the problem wasn't just price distortion — it was that planners didn't have the information feedback loop needed to know whether steel should go into a car, a rail, or a pipe, because prices weren't responsive to actual markets.
That doesn't actually exist in a hypothetical 'pure' free market. Yes, physical goods like sneakers might pass through a middleman layer, but that doesn't mean information isn't passing across the layers, or that the economy isn't able to rationally allocate resources to sneaker production, or that producers are specifically cut off from input costs, or that any of this implies higher costs at all. In fact, in a free market, those layers notionally exist specifically because they reduce costs.
It is with noting that direct-to-consumer models exist pretty much everywhere, and pretty much everywhere, they compete with the middleman approach to no clear discernable advantage: Nike will sell you shoes directly on their website and yet still sells them at the local Foot Locker, too.
impossiblefork@reddit
Without strong competition and new entrants on markets, you do not get prices that can be used for economic calculation.
The problem isn't only middlemen, it's also entrenched systems integrators.
There are products that you simply buy in the west without partnerships with specific companies because a small group of companies have the whole production chain locked down. This is especially obvious when it comes to synthetic crystals.
Recoil42@reddit
New-entrant D2C shoe brands exist by the bucketloads. Vessi, Allbirds, Rothys, Atoms and Soludos are all out there waiting for you to make your purchase, just to name a few. Amazon will feed you a hundred more from the Chinese brands themselves. You're going to have a hard time demonstrating a lack of competition or new entrants in the sneaker market.
SmoothBaseball677@reddit
It's hard work, and you have to debate with them. If they have a position, you can't convince them with facts.
Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho@reddit
You can just google ‘cheap sneakers’ and find some for $30. The existence of luxury goods at higher price points isn’t a problem, you don’t have to buy them if you don’t care.
xlb250@reddit
That’s not the main problem. The US car industry is heavily subsidized/politicized too. Maybe even more than China, especially if you consider gas…
Imagine a country where it is illegal to compare the president to Winnie the Pooh. Now this country controls the world’s critical assembly and supply chains for vehicles and chips.
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Alone_Peace371@reddit
Here comes an article that doesn’t mention the rootless cabal or occupiers who are deliberately sabotaging our economy
King-of-redditors@reddit
This sub has turned to shit in record time
verdegrrl@reddit
Be the change you want to see Mr/Ms 28 day account holder.
DudeWhereIsMyDuduk@reddit
There's been a definite downturn in individual posters - I'm not on the mod side so I don't know if more mod actions have been taken since the API blackout or not, but it definitely feels like there's just less original traffic.
verdegrrl@reddit
We lost some of the best and most engaging contributors. Those that remain have often pulled back and aren't as engaged.
Recoil42@reddit
Jingoists when confronted with uncomfortable narrative violations:
Available_Win5204@reddit
I can't think of any Chinese products that I want, or that anyone in America gives a shit about? Is DJI the drone company Chinese? That might be the sole exception? Or maybe TikTok?
China has yet to "crack the code" on making desirable products that the west wants to buy. They are experts at producing "eerily similar" products already pioneered by western companies and improving on their specs (Apple, Tesla, etc), but beyond that, their products have yet to be perceived as "cool."
iloveturkey7@reddit
China remains #1.
V8-Turbo-Hybrid@reddit
So, Japanese don't hire and bring in foreign experts, are you kidding ?
Recoil42@reddit
I don't think it's a strong point, and they're very clumsily throwing Japan into the mix, but there's a tiny thread of truth there. You just have to take a long trip to connect the dots and spend an hour taking about brands like Kuka and IDRA and systemic complexities like how SOEs are defacto union efforts, and unfortunately the article isn't putting the leg work in to get there.
I think mostly, it falls apart as a narrative mostly when you remember f.ex how much involvement Softbank has in the Chinese economy, or how much Apple has cross-pollinated with Foxconn, or that Toyota runs a JV with BYD, or how Volkswagen has bought into Xpeng.
V8-Turbo-Hybrid@reddit
I mean the whole article is very bad. Asian automakers do hire and use foreign experts. Specially, Korean has hired most experts from German automakers, and their experts are exactly Europeans.
Recoil42@reddit
Yeah that statement in particular is quite peculiar.
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