BYD has pretty amazing tech to be honest, but putting protectionism as an argument against the US and pro BYD in the same sentence is naive at best. The CCP allowed BYD to exist and the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend regardless of any human right concerns elsewhere.
And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.
The CCP's protectionism is because China is going for a cultural victory. It wants Chinese products to be available and inexpensive and purchased around the world. It puts resources to that end.
The US's protectionism is for the enrichment of the CEO, board members, stockholders, and Executive Branch's family members. It wants to protect the domestic market from sending money somewhere other than the relatives of the people in power.
While they're both "protectionism" they're not the same policies.
It is just sad that commentary like this even exists.
I sincerely am curious of the education that produces sentences like this. On one hand it is articulate and educated, on the other hand its amazing that one can think China is doing this out of charity and not wiping out its competitors one after the other.
I fear you badly misunderstood my comment if you think I think China is doing anything at all out of charity.
China wants to supplant the US as the world hegemony and we'll all be worse off for it. The Chinese protectionism I described is China exercising an avenue they think will help them approach that goal. It certainly is not charity.
Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.?
The main difference that I see isn’t protectionism, it’s that BYD took a direction the market wanted, whereas US auto makers have not produced vehicles that were appealing to consumers who had choices.
BYD's direction was largely at the behest of the Chinese government, who were willing to demand things of BYD in exchange for that protectionism, instead of wringing their hands and saying "nothing you can do about the market" while simultaneously propping up industries of national strategic significance.
No, it is not. From mass recalls to faking sales targets and finances, BYD is actually facing serious problems. As soon as their benefits stop they are going the way of Evergrande
These aren't things unknown to other car manufacturers. Tesla, in particular, has suffered from mass recalls and faking sales. It also only really exists as a company because of government investment.
I may end up living outside the US next year (was going to be this year but it’s been postponed) and when I was investigating auto options, I’ve been severely tempted by the BYD Seal as a replacement for my Prius. All the reviews I’ve found have been positive and while I’m not a big fan of the compromises made in the display mount for the useless automatic rotation feature, it’s quite tempting. I’m torn between just getting a new Prius or spending an additional 8K for the Seal. I don’t know that I’ll drive enough for the difference in cost to add up (or, for that matter, to justify buying a car at all, but that’s a question for a different day), but I really like the idea of not contributing to the pollution in the urban area I’d be living. Option C would be the plugin hybrid version of the Seal which would be cheaper than the Prius.
Mexico City. The big gotcha is that I have two kids and an ex-wife who will be living a few miles away so there will be 1–4 times per week that I’ll need to manage their transport between homes. The kids are the main reason I own a car now.
I don't mean to downplay Trump's strongarming of industry or the obsequiousness shown by tech leaders, but let's be real, it's not remotely the same level of control.
the government is basically subservient to him, and there isn't anything stopping it from making a company cease to exist other than the status quo. If, for whatever reason, him (or in his absence the rest of the government) decide they don't want it to exist, it won't exist. It might not be as explicit as how the CCP does it, but it will have the same result
This might be true for small companies, but it's delusional to think that Trump could unilaterally put an end to one of the major tech companies. It would be a huge legal, political and financial battle, at a minimum. Either you're overestimating Trump's power or underestimating the power of the tech companies.
Given the Trump administration’s actions against private industry from TikTok, to Anthropic, to a hundred other examples from auto makers to air conditioning manufacturers, is it fair to deem it delusional to think he might possibly succeed?
Good luck suing the White House, sovereign immunity basically makes this impossible in most cases.
While sovereign immunity is a problem in and of itself that must be reformed, the real problem here is the illegitimate supplicants on the Supreme Council.
Running a business isn't a human right. Also, I hate the conflation people have that the ability for the CCP to do something means it would. Furthermore, the party in socialist states is basically just the government. It being called a party and being explicitly ideological in function isn't, in practice, very different from the US having something called the federal government that has a constitutional ideology
The US can end any of its trillion dollar companies overnight. Ask anthropic how much they were looking forward to being on the receiving end of the orange gibbon's ire.
If you have ambitions that are contrary to that of the Party, well, they're going to get what they want, one way or another. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal your AI to the military or if you'd rather not sell your home so that a highway can be built over the lot.
Some countries have stronger rule of law protections and social customs that enforce them, but the US has been on a speed run to dismantle all of them in the past year.
I think we've just been on a speed run to refresh our collective memory why we do things/have the systems we have/the rules/laws we have. I am hopeful it will cause a civic improvement long term at the expense of a very high cost that was not worth it. But we've been on a long course of removing civics/western civ classes from school/requirements so this is the alternative, to relive the reasons for why we do things the way we do.
Even when we "refresh our memory", all of the longstanding problems that led to the blind destructive anger are still going to exist. So at best we will have refreshed our memory to a state of conservatism [0] where we just accept all of those problems as not too bad. Plus honestly do you think the people that voted for (and continue to support!) Trump really value intellectual honesty or have any kind of memory? Four years is all it took for them to "forget" what a disaster his first term was. The only things I see coming down the line are more rationalization and scapegoating.
[0] actual conservatism, not the dishonest use of the label by reactionaries/fascists to cover for their radical agenda
> Some countries have stronger rule of law protections and social customs that enforce them
Do they?
Ultimately, what you see in China is the dream of well-capitalized authoritarians in the US. You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions. If you want to open a factory that makes electronics where people work 18 hours a day, you do it. If you want to open a rare-earth minerals mine that lets its tailings leech into the water table, you do it. If you want to launch a rocket fueled with hypergolics and it could crash onto a populated area, you do it. If a group of people get in your way, you arrest them and send them off to a re-education camp. They certainly aren't allowed to run for office and change how things are run, not unless they pass the ideological litmus test put in place by the local Party boss.
More and more, that's what we're doing here in the US, too. We're making people work insane hours to afford the cost of living. We're undoing environmental protections so that we're more "competitive". And most importantly, we're letting a strongman move the country more and more towards a single-party state that enforces a social and ethnic hegemony on the population.
And, to be fair, why wouldn't they want this for themselves? The headline says it all: people will look the other way on all of this for the right price. A European will talk about how important it is for the continent to decouple itself from the US while gladly shipping thousands of euros to a country that is the logical conclusion of what the US is going through.
> You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions.
Sorry, what? China regularly prosecutes billionaires. Between 2003 and the mid 2010s it EXECUTED at least 15 billionaires.
When was the last time a US billionaire faced a death penalty case, even when their actions directly result in tens of thousands of innocents dying?
Isn’t the US much more aligned with the dreams of the capital class, given that distinction alone? All the money in the world won’t save a Chinese citizen from their laws. Meanwhile, we have the President’s family selling crypto coins and NFTs and Trump Gold Cards and “produced by USA” Trump phones made in China.
You're putting capital on a higher hill than the political class. That's not always the case.
Billionaires are problematic by their very existence, but the sort of power they want is what the CCP has. They want to use their capital to build that. Trump's having the best luck so far. If there are people who also just happen to be extremely wealthy who get in their way, they'd gladly use the power they then had to get rid of them. Alex Karp would be a good example of this sort of aspirational melding of the state and capital.
In a way, the CCP is beyond someone with a lot of money being able to do anything about it, which would be nice, except for the fact that they're totalitarian.
Comparisons between CCP and private industry in the West seems misaligned in several respects. CCP does not have fiduciary duty to shareholders, instead, it has accountability to national political goals as well as broad based economic outcomes.
This is a much different model. Yes, the CCP has the sort of power that elite authoritarians crave, but it also has constraints and demands that no elites would ever face.
I would add that China also executes quite a few government officials for corruption and bribery. Estimates based on reporting suggest that about 25 Chinese officials each year are executed for this, and over 200,000 have been prosecuted in serious criminal trials, often with multi decade prison sentences or even life sentences. Again, the contrast with Western permissiveness is stunning.
Of course it has fiduciary duty to shareholders. If they don't set up deals that investors want, they can't continue to exist. Is it something that they can be sued for in a court? No, but it's just how markets work.
As far as the execution of government officials for bribery, they also do quite a bit of other enforcement action that "Western permissiveness" just wouldn't tolerate, like sending ordinary people - not billionaires or cadre members - to re-education camps for wrongthink.
China does not have “shareholders”, though. There are incredibly substantive differences between the accountability structures and expectations of shareholders, and those that govern broad based and diverse national geopolitical interests in China.
China’s government is likewise not accountable to or easily fit into the framework of “a market”, for reasons not the least of which include it being explicitly anti-capitalist. Wealth hoarding does not accumulate political power in China, and those who attempt this play can and regularly do find themselves put back in their place - possibly a prison or a crematorium.
As for re-education “camps”, the US imprisons approximately 10% of its population - a huge number by any standards historical or contemporary - and virtually none of these are billionaires or governing elites, who are functionally immune to the systems of authority that “rehabilitate” regular Americans.
