BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.
I was glued to the window while flying over southern China recently. There is so much infrastructure you can see from the air, even in fairly rural provinces. So many bridges. So many wind turbines. It is visibly a country on the move, a country that believes in itself and its ability to do things. The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.
I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.
They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people
I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year
In the same vein, it’s reasonable to take a foreigner’s view with a grain of salt. For all its impressive progress, China doesn’t show off its problems.
The “West” had the same problem many times during the first Cold War, where things in the Soviet Union seemed really great from the outside. Only after the collapse did the truth become clear.
Now, I don’t think China is even remotely similar, but never forget that it is not a free society.
Try browsing Chinese social media (WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, etc). The internet is ripe with non-anonymous criticism of the gov't
People often point to the take down of Winnie the Pooh memes as censorship but I don't think people realize there's a long history of racist groups using Pooh as a slur about Asian people and Tigger about black people. The meme exploded in popularity from a picture of Obama and Xi being compared to Tigger and Pooh.
You can have whatever opinion you want about taking down racist content but I don't it's any different from Western platforms. But spending any time on Chinese social media will quickly dispel the idea of harsh consequences for speech (an especially silly idea coming from members of the nation that contains 25% of the world's prisoners)
>In the US it's practically a right of passage to be a young adult and very vocally hate the country, hate the government.
Well, unless ICE murders you at a protest for expressing your hate of the government's actions.
>In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
That's very much not true. China isn't North Korea like Westerners imagine. Unless you riot, take to the streets, or become a big agitator or dissident, Chinese government and media actually does allow some controlled escape valves for regular people to vent about problems, no issue with that. This isn't Stalin's reign of terror.
You'll only get disappeared if you end up becoming a big fish to threaten the CCP, like Jack Ma, but otherwise the CCP don't end disappearing every schmuck who complains about the government.
You might not know this, but as a nation, you don't get very far economically, academically and technologically in the long run by consonantly oppressing your people under a culture of permanent fear of their government. You can't bleed a stone.
And China got where it is, due to its successful policies from the last half-century that brought prosperity and lifted millions of of poverty, it's government has earned a certain level of "buy-in" from the majority of the population, meaning the people are more likely to be cooperative and work with the totalitarian government towards a common set of mutually beneficial goals, rather than wasting their energy trying to mass emigrate out of the country or to fight for democracy.
And that's what so dangerous about this, because unlike the USSR who served in the west as THE model of inevitable failure for such systems, China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.
Sure, but in this case it seems spot on. China really does have a disturbingly high youth unemployment rate, along with a population that's aging and shrinking. I have no idea if they're headed for a major economic crash, but the track record of command economies controlled by a paranoid aging dictator don't have a very good track record.
For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.
Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area.
Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad and when I say that nothing is perfect. There are downsides. I would rather have the infrastructure and I wished the United States still had that can-do attitude. The rail system across the country needs to be upgraded desperately.
The Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they have built two Thorium reactors and refueled one without turning it off, and they appear to be right on schedule to have that larger second reactor online by 2030.
> Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad
If only. Everybody loves cutting the ribbon on shiny new infrastructure, but the cost of maintenance is very real and never ending.
As a simple example, rezone some agricultural land as residential and sell it to developers. Yay, free money! But only once, and now you have a bunch of roads and plumbing etc etc that you need to upkeep forever. If there's people living in the houses and paying taxes, that's fine, but if there aren't or they go away, you now have a very big, very expensive problem. Japan is deep into feeling the pain of this and demographically China is only a decade or two behind.
IDK if pretty much everyone can exclude Florida and Texas, the second and third most populated states. (Or I suppose you could be excluding the Northeast Corridor instead of Florida)
I'm no expert on USA but looking at a map Florida is very obviously on the east coast, and the entire peninsula is only slightly wider than GP's 100 miles.
Touche, I was thinking of it more as 100 miles in length, not 100 miles in width running all the way down the coast, but your interpretation seems more correct.
Neither do UAE or Hong Kong, and see how this ever stopped immigrants from making them immigrant-first economies. If anything, if you can successfully attract immigrants with a residency only, you get the best of both worlds.
Does it matter? If a permanent resident class exists (de facto is fine, if not legal), what would those folks be missing out on that citizenship would confer? You can’t legalize your way to cultural assimilation, and it’s not like the CCP would tolerate a meaningful vote.
I do wonder about this. With demographic collapse coming for almost all nations, or with a notable trend line for it to come, what would happen if other nations basically prevent emigration? Better to keep their people than lose them. Alternatively, those with large populations can use this as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.
I don’t think so. They have a massive working population and foreign entrepreneurship is hard there. Also they have no process of assimilation and are pretty openly hostile to outsiders. If anything you might see low skilled immigrant labor moving there but I don’t think there’s going to be large numbers of high skilled workers moving there.
I doubt it because the Chinese are very protective of their homogeneity and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale. So my guess is that they will be very picky and control both quality and numbers tightly.
>>and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale
As a European - what has happened to us, exactly? I'm curious what kind of thing you think is happening to Europe that is such disaster that even China should be afraid of it.
Complete demographic destruction waved off with "who cares" by the natives, strongly impoverished national culture and "3rd world problems" that any slightly attractive woman living in the city could tell you about? I'm french, btw.
European GDP per capita has not grown since the crash in 2008. Ever since we have heard that immigrants are being imported for jobs, yet the economy only gets worse, house prices increases due to supply and demand and crime rate is not equal among groups. Yes some people are just white supremacists but also, immigration hasn't solved anything in Europe in recent times. It is not like the US where you have a massive startup scene and get an Elon Musk from South Africa to create jobs and add meaningful value.
>>Ever since we have heard that immigrants are being imported for jobs
You do realize that most of European migration is internal, right? Polish workers going to Germany, that kind of thing? It would be like complaining that American migration is crazy because of all the people moving from Kansas to take jobs in California.
>> house prices increases due to supply and demand and crime rate is not equal among groups
As compared to....?
>>It is not like the US where you have a massive startup scene and get an Elon Musk from South Africa to create jobs and add meaningful value.
I'm like, honestly not sure what to say to that. I could maybe start listing successful businesses started and/or ran by immigrants in the EU if that helps? Or is the fact that none of them are as famous as Elon Musk a dealbreaker?
I'm passively curious how the long-term maintenance of this all ends up. You don't just build a bridge, you have to keep it up when the natural strain of the world impacts upon it. Given provinces already have debt problems [0], how the hell will all of this infrastructure look in 50 years?
This is the structure of catabolic collapse. When the mere maintenance costs over run the capabilities/resources of the civilisation.
Funnily enough it may turn out that those nations that just muddled along could have the best long term out comes. Yes, they never got the really good stuff but they also won't have a harder decline.
"You cannot fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor" - Turkish proverb
Shanghai was great in the 2010s. Seems like a different place today.
Are the bullet trains making enough to pay down construction debt yet? My understanding is that that has been a struggle, which is going to be a problem when they get past being new and start having more and more maintenance expense on top of paying back construction debt.
I traveled to Wuhan twice a year for business for much of the last decade (until the pandemic).
China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)
Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.
It has been called the 4-2-1 problem. 4 people had 2 kids. Those 2 kids had 1 of their own. This means there ends up with a more elderly people with far fewer young to support them. That doesn't look like a recipe for social stability. This is why they are going in so hard on automation nowadays, they are trying to do what Japan attempted in the 90s/2000s but hopefully with more success.
This was originally a side effect of the One child policy, but now it is continued due to difficult living situations. This is not a uniquely China issue.
Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.
But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.
To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.
Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.
Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).
A Chinese person who was here in the US as a foreign student once commented to me that he was so surprised that the United States was like the country side. He didn’t realize how rural the country was.
This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.
I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
100% tariff and political threats -- implying that they'd find a way to mark them as "unsafe", despite the fact that Canada and Europe tend to have higher safety standards than the US and already have BYD presence.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
Some level of protectionism is in the best interest of national security. How is the local electronics industry that you referenced in the US doing? What is the ramification of eliminating the job market for engineers or discarding all of the US manufacturing know how? The CCP knows the answer to that question
The reason I called out Lada in my original comment is because it's a counterpoint to what you just said. The Lada was the result of too much protectionism. Produced from an empire that was too inward looking and feared interacting with the rest of the world on equal terms.
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
what has become of America where we are now scared shitless of China... oh well, i is what it is... America our ancestors built would have been like bring it on bitches and here we are "oh please, lets not let China in, our companies are subpar and we stand no chance against such a foe...
Global automakers typically make small modifications to vehicles for different markets. Cars, like most engineered products, are built to a list of design criteria. BYD, like every large automaker that does this, has capable engineers that can target any regulatory specification you give them. They already do it for all of the other markets they sell in, just as every global automaker does.
Chinese cars don't exist in the US because of laws specifically designed to prevent their sale here. The tariff for Chinese EVs was increased to 100% a couple of years ago when it was rumored that BYD was going to move to the US market. And currently, there is a bill circulating to ban them entirely.
I cannot answer your question but I visited China last year and the amount of different EVs they had was staggering. And really nice vehicles, I was very impressed with that.
This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?
Back when people used to buy Teslas, the company was notorious for how long it took to get repairs done. Even if BYD was exactly like Tesla theres many ways they could differentiate themselves if they were allowed in the US
You’ve just agreed with the vapid take, and added no new information of any value. All we know now is that YOU think all cars are basically the same, and that you think the people who disagree (the vast majority) are all idiots. But you’ve yet to make a case.
No, I said the Internet is trash for these sorts of discussions because it's dominated by people with an agenda who blow things out of proportion.
These products are intentionally designed to be neck and neck. They're different, don't get me wrong. But they're all very close. Like a kid guessing the right answer on a math test. Things aren't the same, but the dumb fanboys who think that every Camry goes 500k on oil changes, every Tesla gets stuck in the shop forever, every American car handles like poo, etc, etc. Those idiots are wronger. You'd never be able to tell how different the cars are on those sorts of axis without fairly rigerous methods. And those people dominate the discussion.
A BYD seal is between $35k and $50k USD in various non US, non China countries that I checked Mexico, Germany, australia, Thailand.
Competition is great but it doesn't mean that the cars in America are bad. The lada was a failure of a car compared to other similar cars available elsewhere. That is not the case here.
I have one of the first runs of model 3s. It still runs perfectly. Great battery life. I'm happy with it. Nevertheless, I find it frustrating that I can't even consider buying a BYD as my next electric daily driver. Because when Tesla and BYD enter markets together Tesla is often getting creamed. That makes me curious as to why. This de-facto ban of BYD in the USA does nothing but encourage stagnation.
The why part is easy - Tesla is about as outdated of a car as it gets, it is practically same car and there are only few options. I own 2014 Model S and my neighbour has 2025 Model S - it is the same car when you look at it. We also got Model 3 (from many years ago) which was then blown up a little into Model Y and we have X from a decade ago. These are ancient cars. The tech inside may have improved but the offering is basically for my grandparents now.
The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.
It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.
1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.
2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.
We all know which country chose which path.
Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.
Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.
We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”
We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.
And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.
> 1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy.
"Dynamic" is doing a hell of a lot of work there. I guess what you mean is steal technology from the west, undercut pricing on foreign goods and dump products in their markets to destroy the competition, end up being the last one standing, because you freely violate trade agreements (as a member of the WTO) and other treaties.
> " so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all type"
They have more coal power than the rest of the world combined, and are building more. Their "path to energy independence with their solar and wind" is purely propaganda.
>they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer
They're literally the sixth largest, just behind Iraq and ahead of Iran. I'm pretty sure people consider Iraq a "big oil producer", right? They also have the 13th most proven untapped oil reserves, and likely more than that since they're not in the business of oversharing.
Your first point is ironic considering Western tech companies are being taken to court for training AI off of pirated intellectual property. I’m not trying to be pro-China but I think this idea that “stealing” technology is exclusive to China is naive. There’s a whole classic Silicon Valley story about the development of the GUI at Apple and Microsoft on the subject. Steve Jobs was furious with Bill Gates when Windows debuted especially since Microsoft was a premier Macintosh developer.
It’s also a little bit ignorant of the existence of different cultural views of copying. Americans who love the second amendment wouldn’t want Europeans telling them to follow European gun laws, why should China follow Western IP laws?
The culture of copying and iterating in the Chinese hardware industry has proven to be incredibly good for innovation and healthy competition, just like open source has been incredibly good for the US software industry.
One example of Western IP ideology being stifling: 3D printing was artificially held back from consumers by patents on FDM printing. The moment those patents expired, prices dropped by two orders of magnitude. It’s easy to argue that Western IP laws result in oligopolies and monopolies forming as an inevitability.
Even if you don’t agree with that, the fact remains that many technology transfers to China are done willingly for payment (e.g., IBM PC division sold to Lenovo, Motorola Mobility sold to Lenovo, high speed rail technology was sold to China. Nobody twisted Volkswagen’s arm and demanded that they build factories in China and train local workforces on automotive production, that was done for the same profit-seeking reasons Toyota came to America and taught GM the Toyota Production System).
Leveraging their coal power for today and building wind/solar/battery for tomorrow is a smart strategy that pragmatically considers their current resource mix. Trump administration canceling already approved wind projects because he doesn’t like how his Scottish golf course has a view of them is not smart strategy.
China is not a big oil producer relative to their size and population. In that sense countries like the US, Canada, and Russia are far more energy secure.
> We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession.
Our gasoline risks hitting $6-7/gallon because of a war we needlessly started to distract from our leader's seemingly rapidly progressing dementia, his approval numbers that are the lowest since I think LBJ, oh, and him being named repeatedly in the files of a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker.
In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.
I would certainly expect a country with 4x the population of the US, which is used as the center of global manufacturing, to need a lot of power.
I’m not sure that’s something that anyone should be concerned about from a geopolitical point of view. Likewise expecting Japan to have ever done the same is… silly.
Not in the same sense the US or Russia. The Sino-Vietnamese war was brief, about a month. Compare that to US or Russian wars. Now, Im not saying that China won't start wars since they've become a lot stronger. Just looking at it through a historic perspective.
I'm sure that the people of Tibet at the very least would feel strongly about the notion of a peaceful, non-expansionist China. You could ask the people of the Philippines as well, or for an admittedly more complicated answer the people of Japan and the RoK.
China is also happily supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, which makes the "not waging war" distinction a bit academic.
I never said they were peaceful and non-expansionist, just that it's unlikely they'd turn to war for those gains.
They also have fought wars, and my wording was admittedly bad. They haven't fought a serious war in a long time, and their military activity in general has been limited to a few border standoffs which I certainly wouldn't take as an indication of its willingness to fight for something like expansion
That's certainly a take. China just has this decades long history of targeting foreign industries, flooding the market with that product, and then being the only one left standing.
The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here, and the government backed goal of one side. Just the cost of labor alone makes that not an approachable thing to do.
On the reverse "bad" US side, we have more and more international auto manufacturers building and investing in factories in the US every year. Strangely, this decision involves billions of dollars and years of work to make happen. It's not based on internet vibes.
And the "renewable" growth is really kind of misleading. They're also building more coal power plants than the rest of the earth, combined, each year. They represent ~50% of the worldwide coal power in use today and produce roughly one third of the total CO2 in the world now, almost 3x that of the US.
But I guess the future is government funded undercutting of international competitors, using technology stolen by the government from those competitors, in order to destroy those competitors, while using very dirty and cheap energy to do so? Is that the lesson we're supposed to learn from them?
The US auto manufacturers could compete, they just don't want to.
They've played their own regulatory capture games here and have all but abandoned the concept of affordable small cars & EVs. They've decided to go all in on $80k luxury EVs and enormous trucks (while being protected by 25% tariffs on light truck imports), and the stupid CAFE footprint loophole.
Maybe if they'd stop flooding our streets with ridiculously sized vehicles and actually tried to compete, it would be a different story. They aren't even trying.
We are just as capable of offering subsidies, if thats what it takes, to make small affordable EVs.
It's what the USA did during its industrialisation, it's what Japan did during its industrialisation. If you are looking to history to find ways to make your country prosper and industrialise, wouldn't you take those examples since they panned out pretty well?
The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies, and helped flood the market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?
There's a lot of data around that in the history of the US and Japan?
For the first part, yep. Samuel Slater (known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" in the US, but "Slater the Traitor" in the UK) was the most well known example, but was also simply one piece of a large policy of ignoring European parents and encouraging people to come with 'stolen technology' to the US and make a competing company here.
> The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies... market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?
NSA spied on Airbus in the 90s and passed along information to Boeing and MacDonell Douglas - paving the way for the latter to win a Saudi deal, over Airbus. Further, Boeing airliner development is subsidized by military purchases of its jets by the US government. Its easy to forget that increasing the influence of and/or financially benefitting American champions falls under the auspices of "National interest"
See Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. Concern for IP tends to come _after_ a country develops.
American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A., and many (all?) of them required multiple government bailouts over the past few decades.
If you think that keeping China is good for the consumer, you'll have to present a stronger case than "we must protect our companies".
> If you think that keeping [out] China is good for the consumer
It would be excellent for the consumer, in the rather short term, to not keep them out. Cheap cars! Cheap goods flooding our markets are great for consumers in the short term.
> American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A
Here's a game:
One company is American. The other is not.
Company 1 Market Share:
North America: 16.5%
South America: 8.9%
Asia: 7.6%
Company 2 Market Share:
North America: 14.87%
South America: 8.3%
Asia: 8.28%
Now, without looking, which is the "US company without market share outside of NA", and which is the foreign company that understands how to compete?
Unfortunately, I looked, so let me add to this game, starting with the fact you omitted Europe:
Company 1: Europe ~0% (trucks & SUVs just don't sell well there it seems)
Company 2: Europe 7%
Company 1: Manufactures in 8 countries, 2/3 of its factories are in North America.
Company 2: Local production of cars in 25-30 countries depending on partnerships.
> The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here
We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.
The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.
I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.
Many predicted it for a long time, the US will always be a great power, for structural and geographical reasons, but it won't keep the position it had for almost a century.
The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions, I don't foresee huge conflicts incoming, but I am a not entirely sure the US will manage to lost its position as gracefully as the British Empire.
It could be bad news for US citizens if their currency precipitiously lose its power, and they'll look for people to blame.
> The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions
One of the reasons China wants Taiwan is because it would enable further territorial expansions into The Philippines and Japan. China considers any neighboring Democratic nation a threat. Taiwan is just their first / easiest prospective target.
If you have access to PBS, there's a very good documentary that touches on this a bit called Invisible Nation.
It seems like BYD is a much bigger threat to Europe (specifically Germany) and Japan. The auto industry is big in the US but an insignificant amount of total exports. Germany and Japan could both lose their cash cows if the Chinese auto industry dominates international sales.
That's not really like with like. If you divided the states in USA into countries, their sales would be "international". The designation is misleading.
The main point is that BYD is an existential threat to Germany and Japan. Per Wikipedia (List of countries by exports + List of countries by vehicle exports, latest available data):
Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.
BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.
No wonder, VAG has only produced overpriced cars for a while...
I recently helped a friend looking for a brand new SUV in the 70-80,000 euro range (taxes included) and the audi Q5 was both the most expensive and the worst built one in that price range.
We checked loads of cars and agreed that the volvo XC60 was arguably the best value for money, the BMW X3 was the one which drove the best (but also the most uncomfortable), the Lexus NX450h was the most comfortable and the best built, the Mercedes GLC was probably the most balanced one (although the value for money wasn't great).
The Audi Q5 only stood out for poor build quality and being overpriced. It's literally the only car which we didn't see an upside for, we didn't even bother to test-drive it... Also it seems they aren't very reliable anymore...
As a counterpoint, around 1/3 of EVs I see in France are Renaults. SImilar story, but a bit less evident, in Spain.
Both have decent amounts of Hyundai Ioniqs, Teslas, and some BYDs and Dacias. But especially in France, Renault Meganes, 5s and now the 4 is everywhere.
Don't forget that "Europe" is actually 30ish (if you count EU) or even more countries (if you count the continent), with wildly different markets and players on them.
The problem the US has, at least in this area, is that it's manufacturing is in the dumps and that's not even plainly bad thing.
No US born child in the last 30 years aspired to working a factory job. The US is an advanced economy with advanced jobs. We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas.
I can tell you with first hand experience, that this problem is much deeper than "the US needs to catch up" because in reality what is happening is that China is the one playing catch up. The US is already 30 years into the endgame of economic development. China is where the US was 75 years ago, and on paper, the US has only progressed from that point.
> We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas
Generate wealth for whom, though?
That's also ignoring the entire economic underclass that system creates of service & gig workers that can no longer afford to live in the cities in which they work. Not everyone has the ability or desire for knowledge work.
The US still needs to catch up too. We have an infrastructure problem. Where is our high speed rail and public transit? Cycling infrastructure? Renewables? Housing in high demand areas? Socialized healthcare? Safety nets for said economic underclass?
We are behind in so many ways because we view wealth generation for the top xy% as the only metric of success.
It's the progression of countries from agriculture economies to service economies. 1950's US was a manufacturing powerhouse with almost entirely in house supply chains and with heavy public infrastructure drives, not at all unlike China today.
But trust me, all those people working in poor conditions for cheap pay in China will do everything they can to ensure their kids don't work those jobs. And just like the US, that fountain of cheap labor will go away and everyone will want their comfy high paying desk job.
I don't mind restricting Chinese imports in principle, since China is well known to be very protectionist, moreso than Western countries for sure. Trade needs to be a two way street.
That said, it is indeed disappointing that we can't get their affordable EVs over here. Western legacy automakers really need a kick in the ass (especially since Tesla seems to just be phoning it in now).
With EVs, Tesla's the only one in the US not phoning it in. I used to think they were until I got a new Model Y Juniper.
I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.
But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.
I do think they're missing an affordable SUV (something that's a true 3-row SUV like the Model X but cheaper). And Musk has teased something like that recently.
And Rivian is about to make an affordable SUV. So overall, I am hoping that there is a vibrant ecosystem of EVs from companies that actually understand software (as opposed to many EVs that have shitty software). Not sure about Lucid.
How do you like Model Y so far? I am eyeing that and a Rivian. The newest Y design is great (outside) and the price is where I want it. But I can’t help thinking that it will break the second I complete my signature for purchase/lease.
I absolutely love it. I had a Model 3 for 7 years before that, and that car (at least in 2018) felt like a slightly beta car. Manufacturing was a bit shoddy in places, but still was an _awesome_ car to have for 7 years.
But the Model Y seems like they fixed everything I complained about with the 3. Smoother ride, everything feels higher quality, and FSD (if you can get it) is just amazing.
Anyway with Teslas, you feel like you're living 10 years in the future from everyone else on the road. But Full Self-Driving makes it feel even more stark.
Like I said, at the price points of the Model Y (at its quality), there aren't too many alternatives. At least in Sept 2025 when I looked. I wish there were.
I don't count BYD because I was never going to buy a BYD even if it was available, because of how deeply connected these cars are nowadays. Maybe it's irrational, but giving the growing drumbeat of some sort of conflict with China over Taiwan, it doesn't seem prudent to have a fully connected car phoning home to the CCP.
Price point is a major factor. I am looking at other EVs but can’t get over how expensive some are (e.g. Taycan). Now I know there is an argument that a Porsche drives nothing like a Tesla, and sure, I believe it. (I own a Boxster). But the price gap is huge.
Thanks for the insight. The more I look at the Y the more it moves closer to the top my list.
You can tow. However you can't reasonably tow for any distance. You can probably even tow for most trips - but you will spend 1/3rd of the trip or more sitting at a fast charger in the best case (and in many cases the only charger is a level 2 chargers so many hours at the charger for every 1 driving)
I've had to rent cars a couple times the last year due to flight cancellations. Twice I got a corolla and was really impressed how nice they were, then I got an upgrade to a Cadillac. It had the lousiest transmission and the interior was covered in low quality feeling materials. Honestly at this point I would never buy American, sloppiest fit and finish I've seen.
One thing China did which was smart was to start training thousands of engineers about twenty years ago, about 10x the number of US engineering graduates. That's paying off now.
It was also a little sad to see the treatment of Tesla by Biden. It was the world's leading EV company at the time but he excluded from EV get togethers because he wanted the unionised companies like GM to win. I think that sort of thing - protecting mediocre incumbents that contribute to the right politicians didn't help. Musk was a dem at the time but after that flipped to Trump and went a bit off the rails.
The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong
If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)
Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...
[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...
> but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys
My point is that you can get that with ~1/1000th the compute we spend. The truly useful parts of the internet are a tiny fraction of the tech footprint. There's more net value for us in Wikipedia than there is in ~a trillion dollars of the more vapid tech firms. And it runs on 3m/year in hosting costs.
You are right that China has a food security problem, though. I am, however, assuming that its government isn't blind to it - the country is self-sufficient for high-calorie staples, and wouldn't starve even if all food imports stopped.
No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy
China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports
All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.
That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...
And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.
The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.
So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.
US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)
Tesla would be considerably more popular globally if Elon kept his political opinions to himself and exaggerated capabilities and timelines a bit less.
Another thing overtaking the US is average IQ scores. Both in the current baseline and in rate of change. US has been declining, China has been increasing.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
To be very practical here… the lack of rights and freedoms as they exist in China typically has no consequence to the lives of individual people. For example you have no right to protest. But how many of us have exercised that right in the US? Personally I never did. And honestly those protests end up being just parties and parades
I see claims like this all the time on HN. Where is this data supposed to be coming from? When I look it up on Google, I get data ultimately sourced from shady online IQ tests (which nonetheless purport to provide a monotonic ranking of every country in the world from China to Nauru, despite the fact that virtually none of these countries collect IQ scores from their populations).
I have no reason to doubt that China is modernizing and improving their gross aptitude for knowledge work! The directional point you're making may very well be valid! I'm just wondering how anyone could be quantifying it in terms of "average IQ", a metric that generally does not exist.
I write my congressman every few months about something. Sometimes just to send a form letter that one of the various organizations writes for me. I also vote regularly.
It makes sense to ban BUD imports but don’t you dare try and both sides this argument by saying EV and renewable power strategy are the same on both sides.
> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
The problem is, China isn't competing fairly!
As a Western manufacturer, bound to well-paying union labor and environmental protection laws, and restricted by the mechanisms of the free markets, you cannot compete with a country that employs all sorts of labor abuses (from complete ignorance about OSHA and its national equivalents over 996 work model to outright forced labor and slavery), completely wrecks its own environment and provides virtually unlimited financial funds to its companies in its quest to achieve dominance.
China is inarguably the biggest threat the entire rest of the world faces and barely anyone is even seeing the dangers.
China harvests organs of muslims. China doesn't allow LGBTQ representation on public media. China forcibly married uyghur women to handle men. It's important to remember the whole global picture before we take sides.
It's like what happened in the 80's with japanese cars. Except, America's poised to become a oligarchy and will absolute just punch itself in the face rather than let the oligarchy suffer.
lmao. "religious nationalism"? What are you referring to here? The USA's new tighter immigration standards? What pray tell is China's immigration policy? Ignorance? Are you referring to perhaps San Francisco progressives eliminating enhanced schooling because it makes some students feel bad about themselves?
Fear? Oh I know, you are talking about how in blue states they can't even build simple housing never mind mega projects like high speed rail and that's why red states are acquiring population and capital at accelerating speeds.
those mega projects are almost always killed by republicans. also, listen to the rhetoric around christianity in republican circles and tell me it isn't religious nationalism
Your understanding of the situation is over a decade out of date. The Chinese are outright innovating at this point, they are well past the copy-paste stage. If you'd like to catch up, this is a good place to start:
38.9% of BYDs direct profits are from subsidies. Tesla subsidies expired already… if we are going to judge on equal footing China is subsidizing a much bigger part of BYDs sales.
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
Coal is still the majority of generation capacity [1] in China and China continues to build a lot more coal [2]
Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.
This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.
The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme. I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction. Sure China's trajectory is good.
But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capita than the US and it's still quite far from that. Let's talk about reality here. The US shouldn't rest on its laurels, but we need to be real about where we are not how we feel
A lot can change. This administration has 2.5 years left. I'm tired of Reddit and Twitter doom-based virality hacks subsuming every net forum.
> But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capita than the US and it's still quite far from that.
China has significantly lower co2 emitted per capita than the US already. Per kWh no, but that's a different thing. AFAICT China's renewable growth is now outpacing demand growth significantly though, so that per-capita gap will widen, and the per kWh is steadily improving as well, and faster than the US.
For some concrete numbers: China added 400GW of renewables in 2025 vs 78 GW of coal generation. Reduced CO2 intensity of power grid by 5% vs US 3% drop. In 2025 US total power emissions went up 5% (for many reasons, but arguably high gas prices and lots of data centres) while China total power emissions dropped 1.5%
All the details make China's path look much cleaner than the US's.
> China has significantly lower co2 emitted per capita than the US already. Per kWh no, but that's a different thing.
Sorry I meant per kWh not per capita.
I don't disagree that China's path looks cleaner than the US right now, but also think "US decline" is viral hyperbole. It's the kind of thing people use on Twitter to get everyone to start discussing something. It's the kind of thing people say on Reddit all the time to add a doomer emotional valence on their comment. I want HN to be better than that but it's obviously not.
The US has been losing in the automotive market for decades now, with Japanese brands hitting 25% penetration in the '80s, the Korean brands starting in the '90s, and by 2020 Asian brands making up roughly 45% of the market. US automakers are staying afloat in the CAFE-exempt space of light trucks.
It's true that this administration has been hostile to renewables, notably shutting down offshore wind. But I'm not sure what this has to do with "decline". In 2.5 years we'll have a different admin. There's already pressure to electrify cars with high gas prices thanks to the Hormuz crisis.
Where's the "decline" bit? What does it mean to "decline"? I maintain that it's largely bait to fish for upvotes and engagement.
This administration is attempting - and mostly succeeding - in "Dismantling the administrative state". They even provided a handy checklist (project 2025). That shit won't bw undone in 2.5 years.
> The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme.
The difference is the US's hostility to renewable energy versus China's embrace of it. China's path takes them to zero coal eventually - the US's does not.
I can't see China changing course. They're all in on renewables for energy independence. It's already the cheapest source of energy. They're exporting panels and batteries everywhere too.
China can continue to rely on coal for energy independence also. We're seeing this as countries that depended on LNG started firing coal plants again with the Hormuz crisis in effect. As a strong believer in climate change, it's admirable that China is innovating in renewables, but it's not a prerequisite for energy independence. They're already facing anemic job growth and overbuilt infrastructure capacity. If the government wants to redirect investment and spending elsewhere, they can switch back to coal plants rather than necessarily turning on renewables.
Manufacturing and shipping EVs I agree is going nowhere because they continue to be the leader and an increasing number of developing and underdeveloped countries are finding it easier to light up electrical sources than import oil.
> I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction.
It's literally just a mind virus and folks hear it on the news and like the Chinese hypersonic missiles they just hear some capability or reporting and then don't know what to do with it except to parrot it.
They don't think about China's lying down culture [1], for example, ghost cities and over-building doesn't seem to phase them [2] (communism tends to waste a lot of money and drive economic inefficiency), China's over-capacity for manufacturing and now struggling to find markets for goods [3], local corruption, disappearing of folks who disagree with their government, and more. Even with respect to infrastructure. Yea they built a lot. Good luck maintaining it at an affordable cost. China has more manpower to do literally throw bodies at the problem, but economic physics will still win out and China's declining population and demographic crises and xenophobic culture don't help.
Now, with that being said, China has done some absolutely amazing and wonderful things. But we shouldn't confuse China's progress with a corresponding American decline. Instead, the more sophisticated model is looking at both American and Chinese progress while other nations, and the EU are struggling.
Yeah I see that we're entering a multipolar world, where China and the US form 2 dominant poles but other countries/alliances like India and the Gulf States create stiff competition. A world with more prosperity for more people seems good to me.
> A world with more prosperity for more people seems good to me.
Agree with that sentiment absolutely. I’m not totally sure that is a given, however. The primary reason being that as America declines economically from the post-war boom, it no longer has the resources to simultaneously fight or contain many belligerent actors (Russia, Iran, China, &c.) and without the other dominant power (China) stepping up to assist in what I would loosely describe as a bipartisan way we are likely to see more conflict, not less, in my view.
As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones
> As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
That's how China was able to compete: banning America from contesting the market.
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
EDIT: thanks I didn't realize I forgot to add the context of my original reply to the post. Edited it to add context.
This site is fascinating place for me, especially comment section. Sometimes, visibly smart folks end up shooting their own feet with things like oversized egos, unwillingness to entertain any idea contrary to their already-held beliefs and many others. Makes me more humble and lowers my expectations of humanity, while in the same time giving me more hope for the future.
Bizzare mix, but pretty fun with controversial topics
This feels like subtweeting (vaguely referencing bad behaviors in this thread without naming anything or anyone) so I'm curious what you're going for with this comment.
They're all over the place in Mexico City. It'll be interesting as these EVs start to show up along the northern and southern borders traveling within the US.
The sad reality is how politically influential it will be for Americans to take a Chinese EV from the airport to a hotel in Cancun and say, "Why don't we have this in the US?"
I agree that that would be great as a consumer, but given how protectionist China is, you can hardly blame countries for responding in kind. Trade should be a two way street.
They do. The Chinese government gave them a special exemption, presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise. Other foreign auto companies are not allowed to open their own factories in China; they have to do a joint venture with a local manufacturer.
BYD has been making batteries since '95, cars since '05, plug-in hybrids since '08 and EVs since '09. I don't doubt that China may have made use of Musk, but I severely doubt he's the one who "taught them how to build an EV".
If you think China can only make stuff by copying what other does, you're gonna under-estimate them.
The timing doesn't line up. BYD has already been selling EVs by the time Tesla opened a factory in China. Heck, they were selling EVs even before _Tesla_ existed.
And they clearly have their own expertise. There are videos of BYD and Tesla car teardowns, and you can see that they quite differ in design philosophies.
I think China was more interested in creating more competition internally, rather than just ripping off the technology.
it follows marxist principles and is building towards communism, which isn't overnight. It's currently in a socialist stage. Also, Xi is closer to the captain of a ship rather than an absolute monarch. He has a lot of power, yes, but that's because the party trusts him, not because he demands it
In the age of Mao, wasn't it closer to Marxism? There are more billionaires in China now, then there were back then. By that I mean, the wealth disparity in China is at an all-time high now, is it not? Xi removed the 2-term limit from his own position, and has been doing an excellent job at consolidating his power base, through all means necessary.
Disclaimer: I believe that pure "capitalism" and pure "communism" are marketing terms which both lead to authoritarianism, aka the "Horseshoe Theory of politics." To me, the natural end-state, if we survive the extremists is Social Democracy. However, it's boring and everyone appears to find the extremes far more exciting.
China was completely mucked up economically under Mao, especially around the cultural revolution. I went there in 1983 when GDP per capita was like $300 and it was a bit prison camp like. It's changed a lot.
I was not there, but I believe that history shows that you are correct. I am not trying to sell Mao at all. If anything, he is a yet another ideological-extremist cautionary tale. (yet again, killed millions of his own people through poorly thought out absolutism)
Until Xi, China appeared to be moving in a good direction.
Not really, marxism is a way of looking at the world, not an economic system in itself
>There are more billionaires in China now, then there were back then
They hadn't even built capitalism fully, so it makes sense that there was less capital
>By that I mean, the wealth disparity in China is at an all-time high now, is it not?
it is, and they're currently working on how to deal with that
>Xi keeps remove the 2 term limits from just position, and has been doing an excellent job at consolidating his power base, through all means necessary.
Sure, but that's just politics. Ultimately if the majority of the party had a problem with him he wouldn't be in power for long before a coup or a request for him to step down happened
It's not. China has literally _thousands_ of years of bureaucratic institutional memory. And it just keeps perpetuating itself.
Before the 20-th century, the Chinese officials had to study the classic Chinese literature and pass exams based on that knowledge. These works were completely abstract and literally useless in day-to-day work. And you had to follow all the rituals to demonstrate your allegiance and being-in-the-group.
Now they just swapped the Classical Chinese works with Marxist writings. Nobody cares about their content, but you have to know them and you have to follow the rituals.
For anyone that doesn't know, then president Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law in 1988 that banned all car imports into the US unless the car is at least 25 yaers old.
Why? Because US Mercedez-Benz dealers were selling their cars at too high a price and a lot of Americans were importing them directly from Germany. So the dealers associations lobbied Congress for a ban.
Traveling in Asia and South America, the primary impression I got was not that this is a war of manufacturing that we're losing but that the game is already up. Chile was full of Chinese makes and they were all surprisingly good. Riding in a Chinese MG in Taiwan or Hong Kong you suddenly realize that this isn't a future competitor. The people talking about the war of car manufacturers here seem like those Japanese holdouts who were still fighting in 1956.
Come to Australia. About two years ago there was so many Teslas. In the space of two years, I've seen twice as many BYDs. I can only imagine this will continue.
It's not "surprisingly" unless you haven't bought much in the last 20 years.
China-owned brands are now often better and more premium than their Western counterparts across the entire spectrum. Give me Anker over Belkin any day. There are a few areas where the West still leads - Chinese software tends to be buggier and less polished, luxury apparel isn't at the same standard - but that lead is diminishing rapidly. Customer service could still do with some improvement: it's usually much slower and less professional, but the trade-off is it's not uncommon to end up talking to an actual engineer who can investigate and solve the problem rather than just follow a script, even at a huge company.
The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
Yeah the game is already lost. The question is how long the US can keep dumb laws that don't acknowledge reality. Unfortunately that timespan is 249 years and counting apparently.
It has nothing to be about moat. It's about its older car brands and oil so much that it doesn't stay competitive.
Jensen Huang says that the same thing can happen to NVIDIA. Tinygrad is stopping exporting Blackwell based cards to most countries except the 10 Tier 1 countries, as all others need a few months of paperwork. Huawei GPUs don't have these export restrictions.
Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech. I know that isn't a short scale by tech standards but has BYD, and others, really leap-frogged that much?
I'm not in that space myself and do not keep up with EV benchmarks but am curious what advances or other changes were made. I recall reading Ford battery technology was also very good but interpreted that to be due to general advances in EV battery technology across the board rather than any one specific make/manufacturer.
> Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech.
It seems logical that if someone was going to surpass Tesla in battery tech, it'd be a battery company. BYD has, after all, been making batteries since its founding under the name "Shenzhen BYD Battery Company" 30 years ago.
BYD has its own "God's Eye" self-driving tech, and unlike Musk's pigheaded insistence on cameras only, BYD is incorporating LIDAR into their cars across the range:
There are plenty of FSD failure examples on YouTube too. I don't think you can draw conclusions from that. Especially because FSD isn't actually driverless yet, unlike Waymos.
Other than nice alcantara interior the drive is just a mush and software is awful (BYD Sealion 7). Older ones (i.e. Atto 3) were obsolete from the factory.
I got to sit in Zeekr 7x yesterday (top 3 in NZ by sales in April), hopefully I can get a test drive soon. It actually has every feature Tesla has (and more). Will be interesting to see how they actually execute.
Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.
Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.
I see a lot more Kia’s but I think it’s shifting because dealerships are shifting. The Toyota dealership near me now sells Jaecoo, Cherry, etc. and I am seeing tons of the Jaecoo SUV cars around. The Pentagon Vauxhall dealership I bought my car from keeps emailing me about BYDs.
Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.
There is a significant amount of BYD buses here in Spain, I don't live in Madrid but I go every now and then and I noticed a fair amount of electric BYD.
Also this is anecdotal, but I live in a small province capital (<100k citizens) and the urban planning councilor told me most likely most of the new buses we're getting next year will be electric and they'll probably be either BYD or eCitaros.
I wonder what happens if someone from the US buys one in Canada and just drives it home? At what point and how do they get charged an import tariff? When they register it?
AFAIU, import duties aren't really something you're necessarily "charged" as much as it's something you have a legal obligation to pay. Sure, maybe you could buy a car in Canada and bring it in to the US without paying the tariffs... we call that smuggling.
It's hardly smuggling if there is no process to collect the duties from you. Are you meant to walk into a random local government office and hand them a bunch of cash and say "i think i owe you this" ?!
What if it's a used car, not new, what's the tariff then?
I can't believe there is no process to collect it if you import it just by driving across the border.
I don't know how the US does it, but at least where I'm from, major border crossings (be it a road or an airport or something else) typically always have a place you can go to declare goods you're importing. That's where you're typically expected to, well, declare your goods. I imagine they don't see many people just driving there and saying "Hi, I'm here to declare this car I'm in", but I don't see why it shouldn't work...
You should be loyal only to the extent that the loyalty helps some interests of yours. That is if the car industry ensures military equipment should you need it. (or alternatively you are going to war and don't want them to have the expertise that a car industry has).
For those not paying attention to geopolitics, Taiwan is the real concern here. China wants to control them, and is building a strong military. How the future will play out I don't know, but this should be your concern.
Isn't the concern with over the air updates and back-doors? As in, if the citizens in county A buy country B's cars, and now there is a tiff between the two countries, country B could potentially brick all of those vehicles in country A.
That is just another variation of geopolitical worry. Nobody will do this unless there is a geopolitical situation happening. If you are going to war then bricking the enemies cars is useful. Otherwise it is harmful (even if you do it accidentally you lose trust and so nobody will buy from you again - which is why so often rollouts are done slowly - if it doesn't work you only have a few customers affects and can spend more than a car's value on techs to fix them thus ensuring you don't lost reputation)
also, DAF was large in a very specific time in a very specific place.
Let's not forget that the dutch car industry has always being dependant on german car industry.
The point of China's mercantilist and imperialist games with electric cars, is to attack and kill Western industry, and deprive us of the ability to defend ourselves.
Quality? I'm really interested into hard and extensive data about mechanical (drivetrain, suspension, brakes, etc...) engineering and quality control that would make me put them on the same level as the Japanese.
Lacking that, I must hold the preemptive view that they cut corners at least as much as the average make/
Value price for us. The Sealion 7 for us had the combination of features, dimensions, range, 800v platform, for a price that was simply unbeatable (leasing).
Out of question that Volvo ex90, Kia ev9, Hyundai Ioniq 9 or even the BMW ix3 would have come on top if it wasn’t for the price.
Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg
Tesla severely lacks competition in the North American market. They lost all their first mover advantage by sitting back and spending significant R&D into FSD. Chinese manufacturers have some incredible innovations such as Nio’s battery swapping.
I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.
I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.
In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).
I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).
I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.
It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.
I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).
I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K
Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.
Own the sealion 7. It is feature full, and don’t want to crush your dreams, but i would trade that killer unreliable adaptive cruise control and lane assist with a (missing?!) simple speed limiter 100 times over
Price is so good that even if it’s a little lacking in this regard, I’ll probably still be very happy as a lot of the features are just a bonus.
Important for us was that it’s bigger as we have two growing kids, and that it is essentially an electric that we can plug in to charge.
I’ve only ever used simple cruise control on my CVT Fit and before that on a manual. On the BYD test drive (on my own chosen route) the cruise control seemed to work at least as well as what I was used to and the adaptive in traffic was impressive (to me whose never before had it), but was just one drive so will see how I feel after driving it for a while.
Also, I certainly wouldn’t count on it, but it’s conceivable that a software update could improve things, my honest hunch though is that it would be very unlikely.
My SO bought an Ioniq 6 mostly because of the buttons and the seperate control surface for AC and such but they test drived a BYD as well which was the same as a Tesla, just one huge tablet and endless menus
You can't buy them in the US. You could buy one in Mexico and drive it across the border, but you wouldn't be able to register it in the US. It is probably possible to legally import one but it would be very expensive and time-consuming, and you'd need to know a lot about import law.
AFAIK if its registered in Mexico it can be driven in US under temporary import permit. I've seen the odd Hilux or other new rarity that way. Quite common to see Mexico plates here in AZ in all number of cars not available for sale.
Why has BYD stock been trundling along? They seem like they are so far ahead: incredible blade batteries with ridiculous power density (fast charging)/efficiency/cooling, while being structurally useful (mad cool). And mad popular. I feel like I'm missing something that this company is doing such amazing good work but the stock isn't really moving.
USA boomer car companies run a competition on who can build the biggest crappy SUVs around sold to other boomers who now look aghast at pump prices
Europe boomer car companies can't overrun their nit-pickiness and analysis paralysis and wonder why consumers are picking the car with screens that actually work like a modern device and don't have subscription horns or some other BS like that
The complacency of American, Euro and Japanese auto manufacturers as Chinese, through domestic hyper competition and protectionism. Is going to be an MBA case study on how to fumble the bag.
I will always wonder what Tesla could have been, hadn’t Musk gone completely off rails around the time he was presenting the cybertruck’s vision. Remember when it was pitched at 40-50k?
This is not surprising as other manufacturers continue moving away from producing cheap cars. One notable exception is dacia.
For all the China lovers here it's not a clear sign of Chinese superiority. I saw a video on youtube recently exploring BYD. It's success is due to the fact that the Chinese government as part of their plan to dominate the global car industry gives them massive amounts of money. Which manufacturer can compete with that? European tariffs in the near future looks likely.
Among other things the video explores some of BYD's shadier practices including artificially inflating domestic sales and not paying suppliers for up to 9 months.
I have my doubts whether their success is sustainable.
I hear this all the time, but I would point out that US car manufacturers are heavily subsidized as well. I’m sure other countries do their own things that effectively subsidize their automotive industries as well.
NAFTA and its successor keeps a lot of automotive production and assembly in North America.
The chicken tax protects American manufacturers from foreign competition on trucks and vans.
Tesla was started on the foundations of inexpensive loans and a “free” factory courtesy of government economic stimulus.
GM was bailed out and briefly owned by the federal government, saved by below-market rate loans.
Stellantis is also an organization that owes its existence on a bankruptcy bail-out package.
The US financially incentivizes car usage, period. They underfund transit projects, allow the gas tax rate to lag inflation, make zoning laws that require car ownership, and more. One great way to subsidize car companies is to make car ownership mandatory.
State and local governments frequently give tax incentives to major assembly plants in the name of preserving jobs for their constituents. For example, GM had a $60 million tax break to keep the Lordstown, OH plant open. Some of this was clawed back after the plant closed anyway.
CAFE standards incentivize manufacturers to build SUVs that aren’t practical or popular in many other markets, essentially enshrining America-specific car design, further separating the American market from global car designs. Companies like BYD can’t compete with American cars if they don’t sell models that resemble popular choices like the Ford F-150, which are designs which would be completely insane if sold in the Chinese, Japanese, and European markets.
Ok but we are talking about tens of billions versus tens of millions. And some good old fashioned protectionism which has limited effect on the global market which we are discussing at the moment.
Don't forget their rampant channel-stuffing, which is so flagrant, that it makes Ford's and GM's channel-stuffing antics look like kindergarten games in comparison.
It is a car. Don't hang your personally identity on a car. Many people fail at this, but it is wrong.
Or at least if you do make sure it isn't your transportation. Drive something else most of the time that you don't care about so your identity car isn't scratched. Bring the identity car to a parade with the "pork queen" or whatever.
The chinese are utilitarian but also, like anyone, care about aesthetics. Why make something that looks good enough when that isn't your main goal and the jobs already been done
It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.
Provided they are available in Canada. There’s only roughly 50k imports in the first year and that will be split across all Chinese manufactured EVs (not necessarily Chinese brands). I assume the majority will be Teslas from their Shanghai factory.
BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.
I was glued to the window while flying over southern China recently. There is so much infrastructure you can see from the air, even in fairly rural provinces. So many bridges. So many wind turbines. It is visibly a country on the move, a country that believes in itself and its ability to do things. The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.
I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.
They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people
I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year
I always take these views with a grain of salt, many immigrant's view of their home country is ossified at the time of emigration.
In the same vein, it’s reasonable to take a foreigner’s view with a grain of salt. For all its impressive progress, China doesn’t show off its problems.
The “West” had the same problem many times during the first Cold War, where things in the Soviet Union seemed really great from the outside. Only after the collapse did the truth become clear.
Now, I don’t think China is even remotely similar, but never forget that it is not a free society.
In the US it's practically a right of passage to be a young adult and very vocally hate the country, hate the government.
In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
Try browsing Chinese social media (WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, etc). The internet is ripe with non-anonymous criticism of the gov't
People often point to the take down of Winnie the Pooh memes as censorship but I don't think people realize there's a long history of racist groups using Pooh as a slur about Asian people and Tigger about black people. The meme exploded in popularity from a picture of Obama and Xi being compared to Tigger and Pooh.
You can have whatever opinion you want about taking down racist content but I don't it's any different from Western platforms. But spending any time on Chinese social media will quickly dispel the idea of harsh consequences for speech (an especially silly idea coming from members of the nation that contains 25% of the world's prisoners)
We all saw what happened in Hong Kong...
>In the US it's practically a right of passage to be a young adult and very vocally hate the country, hate the government.
Well, unless ICE murders you at a protest for expressing your hate of the government's actions.
>In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
That's very much not true. China isn't North Korea like Westerners imagine. Unless you riot, take to the streets, or become a big agitator or dissident, Chinese government and media actually does allow some controlled escape valves for regular people to vent about problems, no issue with that. This isn't Stalin's reign of terror.
You'll only get disappeared if you end up becoming a big fish to threaten the CCP, like Jack Ma, but otherwise the CCP don't end disappearing every schmuck who complains about the government.
You might not know this, but as a nation, you don't get very far economically, academically and technologically in the long run by consonantly oppressing your people under a culture of permanent fear of their government. You can't bleed a stone.
And China got where it is, due to its successful policies from the last half-century that brought prosperity and lifted millions of of poverty, it's government has earned a certain level of "buy-in" from the majority of the population, meaning the people are more likely to be cooperative and work with the totalitarian government towards a common set of mutually beneficial goals, rather than wasting their energy trying to mass emigrate out of the country or to fight for democracy.
And that's what so dangerous about this, because unlike the USSR who served in the west as THE model of inevitable failure for such systems, China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.
Sure, but in this case it seems spot on. China really does have a disturbingly high youth unemployment rate, along with a population that's aging and shrinking. I have no idea if they're headed for a major economic crash, but the track record of command economies controlled by a paranoid aging dictator don't have a very good track record.
For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.
Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area.
Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad and when I say that nothing is perfect. There are downsides. I would rather have the infrastructure and I wished the United States still had that can-do attitude. The rail system across the country needs to be upgraded desperately.
The Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they have built two Thorium reactors and refueled one without turning it off, and they appear to be right on schedule to have that larger second reactor online by 2030.
> Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad
If only. Everybody loves cutting the ribbon on shiny new infrastructure, but the cost of maintenance is very real and never ending.
As a simple example, rezone some agricultural land as residential and sell it to developers. Yay, free money! But only once, and now you have a bunch of roads and plumbing etc etc that you need to upkeep forever. If there's people living in the houses and paying taxes, that's fine, but if there aren't or they go away, you now have a very big, very expensive problem. Japan is deep into feeling the pain of this and demographically China is only a decade or two behind.
> Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States
Take a 100 mile strip down the east coast and the west coast. Add Chicago. That's pretty much everyone.
IDK if pretty much everyone can exclude Florida and Texas, the second and third most populated states. (Or I suppose you could be excluding the Northeast Corridor instead of Florida)
I'm no expert on USA but looking at a map Florida is very obviously on the east coast, and the entire peninsula is only slightly wider than GP's 100 miles.
Touche, I was thinking of it more as 100 miles in length, not 100 miles in width running all the way down the coast, but your interpretation seems more correct.
Yeah, same thought. Parent post isn’t theoretical; that’s pretty much what actual US demographics are.
The population of the NYC metro area exceeds that of the entire US Mountain _timezone_.
China will likely become the go-to place for immigrants within couple decades. Just like any other developed economy had.
That would be quite the change, considering they don't really allow any outsiders to become citizens.
Neither do UAE or Hong Kong, and see how this ever stopped immigrants from making them immigrant-first economies. If anything, if you can successfully attract immigrants with a residency only, you get the best of both worlds.
Does it matter? If a permanent resident class exists (de facto is fine, if not legal), what would those folks be missing out on that citizenship would confer? You can’t legalize your way to cultural assimilation, and it’s not like the CCP would tolerate a meaningful vote.
I do wonder about this. With demographic collapse coming for almost all nations, or with a notable trend line for it to come, what would happen if other nations basically prevent emigration? Better to keep their people than lose them. Alternatively, those with large populations can use this as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.
The coming decades will be interesting.
When Europe lost a tone of people to disease, wages went up, housing was cheep and people made families.
Sadly, big business wants cheap labor so we can't have nice things.
This has yet to happen in East Asia and probably never will.
America and countries that engaged in worldwide colonisation are the exception not the rule.
Sorry, WHAT? What about Singapore? Hong Kong?
I don’t think so. They have a massive working population and foreign entrepreneurship is hard there. Also they have no process of assimilation and are pretty openly hostile to outsiders. If anything you might see low skilled immigrant labor moving there but I don’t think there’s going to be large numbers of high skilled workers moving there.
I doubt it because the Chinese are very protective of their homogeneity and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale. So my guess is that they will be very picky and control both quality and numbers tightly.
>>and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale
As a European - what has happened to us, exactly? I'm curious what kind of thing you think is happening to Europe that is such disaster that even China should be afraid of it.
Mass immigration in Europe and its effects. In China and neighbouring countries it is seen as crazy and something to absolutely avoid.
>>Mass immigration in Europe and its effects.
Can you name a few of these effects that China sees as crazy?
Complete demographic destruction waved off with "who cares" by the natives, strongly impoverished national culture and "3rd world problems" that any slightly attractive woman living in the city could tell you about? I'm french, btw.
Ha! In the US women don't need to wait for immigrants to be abused or assaulted. Native born Americans do it.
European GDP per capita has not grown since the crash in 2008. Ever since we have heard that immigrants are being imported for jobs, yet the economy only gets worse, house prices increases due to supply and demand and crime rate is not equal among groups. Yes some people are just white supremacists but also, immigration hasn't solved anything in Europe in recent times. It is not like the US where you have a massive startup scene and get an Elon Musk from South Africa to create jobs and add meaningful value.
Not getting an Elon Musk seems like a massive positive.
>>Ever since we have heard that immigrants are being imported for jobs
You do realize that most of European migration is internal, right? Polish workers going to Germany, that kind of thing? It would be like complaining that American migration is crazy because of all the people moving from Kansas to take jobs in California.
>> house prices increases due to supply and demand and crime rate is not equal among groups
As compared to....?
>>It is not like the US where you have a massive startup scene and get an Elon Musk from South Africa to create jobs and add meaningful value.
I'm like, honestly not sure what to say to that. I could maybe start listing successful businesses started and/or ran by immigrants in the EU if that helps? Or is the fact that none of them are as famous as Elon Musk a dealbreaker?
It isn't true that most migration is internal, actually. Across the whole EU in 2023 77% of new immigrants were non-EU [1], for instance.
[1] https://www.rfberlin.com/immigrant-population-eu/
I'm passively curious how the long-term maintenance of this all ends up. You don't just build a bridge, you have to keep it up when the natural strain of the world impacts upon it. Given provinces already have debt problems [0], how the hell will all of this infrastructure look in 50 years?
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3254680/c...
This is the structure of catabolic collapse. When the mere maintenance costs over run the capabilities/resources of the civilisation.
Funnily enough it may turn out that those nations that just muddled along could have the best long term out comes. Yes, they never got the really good stuff but they also won't have a harder decline.
"You cannot fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor" - Turkish proverb
Visit if you can, and take some bullet trains! We had a blast last year there.
Shanghai was great in the 2010s. Seems like a different place today.
Are the bullet trains making enough to pay down construction debt yet? My understanding is that that has been a struggle, which is going to be a problem when they get past being new and start having more and more maintenance expense on top of paying back construction debt.
They dont have to, they are reqired to make the country work. Its like trying to make us roads profitable.
Or having some silly notion that the post service should be profitable.
Public services generally provide public good that outweighs their cost. Trying to quantify and charge for that cost is a useless exercise.
Well, the Shinkansen lines managed to bankrupt JNR in Japan just fine. :) Still they are a massive benefit for the country.
I've been living in Shanghai sinze 2010, with some time in between in Shenzhen. Shanghai is much better now than in the 2010s.
Not hard to find the evidence of tofu dregs. Start being envious when they stop using ewaste as filler for concrete roads and buildings.
Are these not the same things people are complaining about in the West, though?
I traveled to Wuhan twice a year for business for much of the last decade (until the pandemic).
China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)
Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.
What’s wrong with their demographics? Population decline?
It has been called the 4-2-1 problem. 4 people had 2 kids. Those 2 kids had 1 of their own. This means there ends up with a more elderly people with far fewer young to support them. That doesn't look like a recipe for social stability. This is why they are going in so hard on automation nowadays, they are trying to do what Japan attempted in the 90s/2000s but hopefully with more success.
This was originally a side effect of the One child policy, but now it is continued due to difficult living situations. This is not a uniquely China issue.
https://alexatsintolas.weebly.com/the-4-2-1-problem.html
robots
Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.
But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.
To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.
Tearing down a slum is not gentrification.
Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.
Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).
A Chinese person who was here in the US as a foreign student once commented to me that he was so surprised that the United States was like the country side. He didn’t realize how rural the country was.
This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.
West LA isn't like a Chinese city, but no one in their right mind would call UCLA rural
People are also surprised how rural much of China is.
https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/origin.png
Posting the map in case anyone hasn’t seen it.
Russia, US, Australia, Canada are all like this. Probably many more. The world is a very small place when you look at where most people actually live.
To be fair, six percent is still 84 million people.
I get the same thing here is Australia. There is a lot of space with little going on.
I mean we have the Nullarbor plain. The name literally means 'No Trees', and it is very fitting.
If you ever end up there... I hope you don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullarbor_Plain
When friends visited NYC and we drove around a bit they said “it’s like everything is half finished”
Is that just because of the scaffolding on everything? IIRC that's due to some legal or tax bullshit.
Did he ask about all the bricked up windows in London?
You get what you incentivize.
Presumably referring to population density? People like the low density in California.
I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.
The US is not building infrastructure at the expense of living standard of common people. Ask Americans if they're happy about it.
On the move to where? Massive unemployment amongst youth and population collapse is on its way.
You are projecting a fantasy.
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.
Well, different kinds of protectionism.
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.
One protects against forein interests the other against domestic. The west is all about relative wealth building China is building absolute wealth.
To expand your fortune relatively other people have to lose. Its required.
I don't read that as doing it out of charity. A cultural victory is still a victory. China is very much playing to win.
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.
Where outside the US? You might be fine with just a bike and transit.
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.
> the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend
Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.
While not exactly the same, it does rhyme. More a case of suck up to Donny T and hope they give a tax break or something. Keep the shareholders happy.
I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.
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.
The US has thousands of atrocities under its belt. For this aspect, the US and China tie in terms of the leaderboard.
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.
That's pretty much everywhere, especially China.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Doing anything you want to do that does not harm anyone else, and helps some, is most certainly a human right.
To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-human.
Most businesses are in this category.
the problem is that it does harm people, at least at the large scale. And china exists because of that harm
>dream to make better ways to do things
The inability to exploit other peoples labor to achieve that doesn't mean those things are denied
In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?
The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.
It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.
Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?
100% tariff and political threats -- implying that they'd find a way to mark them as "unsafe", despite the fact that Canada and Europe tend to have higher safety standards than the US and already have BYD presence.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
https://homeland.house.gov/2025/05/21/homeland-republicans-p...
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
Some level of protectionism is in the best interest of national security. How is the local electronics industry that you referenced in the US doing? What is the ramification of eliminating the job market for engineers or discarding all of the US manufacturing know how? The CCP knows the answer to that question
The reason I called out Lada in my original comment is because it's a counterpoint to what you just said. The Lada was the result of too much protectionism. Produced from an empire that was too inward looking and feared interacting with the rest of the world on equal terms.
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
I prefer to take my chances on stagnation vs Chinese industrial hegemony
So you prefer to avoid the competition entirely because you expect to lose? Not very confident in American industrial competitiveness, are we?
> stagnation vs Chinese industrial hegemony
I don't think we get to be stagnant and fend off Chinese industrial hegemony. It's not a symmetric bet.
what has become of America where we are now scared shitless of China... oh well, i is what it is... America our ancestors built would have been like bring it on bitches and here we are "oh please, lets not let China in, our companies are subpar and we stand no chance against such a foe...
American exceptional used to be “we can do this no one else can”
Today it’s “everyone can do this but we can’t”
When the accountant is sweating at the prospect of having the books reviewed by outside auditors, no explanation is necessary.
Global automakers typically make small modifications to vehicles for different markets. Cars, like most engineered products, are built to a list of design criteria. BYD, like every large automaker that does this, has capable engineers that can target any regulatory specification you give them. They already do it for all of the other markets they sell in, just as every global automaker does.
Chinese cars don't exist in the US because of laws specifically designed to prevent their sale here. The tariff for Chinese EVs was increased to 100% a couple of years ago when it was rumored that BYD was going to move to the US market. And currently, there is a bill circulating to ban them entirely.
I could see them going the Huawei (pun intended and apologised for)
I cannot answer your question but I visited China last year and the amount of different EVs they had was staggering. And really nice vehicles, I was very impressed with that.
> Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?
Whatever the stated reasons are is one thing.
The biggest issue is that a network of BYDs in the US would be a massive intelligence coup.
It will never be permitted unless the intelligence aspect is addressed… if it can be.
That's the focus of the yet-to-be-passed bill that is circulating congress.
The patterns of aggressively tariffing foreign automakers for protectionism in the US long pre-dates any sort electronics in cars.
Lobbying forces in the US care deeply about the latter, not so much the former.
Ya I heard that from some chinese facebook users... oh wait...
A BYD seal is basically comparable to a model 3, except it has a more classic car aesthetic as opposed to a giant screen. What are we missing out on?
This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?
Back when people used to buy Teslas, the company was notorious for how long it took to get repairs done. Even if BYD was exactly like Tesla theres many ways they could differentiate themselves if they were allowed in the US
>This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?
To a first order approximation yes.
The online discussion is dominated by fanboys who don't actually know squat and people who have an expensive purchase they need to feel justified in.
The differences between two competing cars of different makes is way, way, way less than these people will make it out to be.
You’ve just agreed with the vapid take, and added no new information of any value. All we know now is that YOU think all cars are basically the same, and that you think the people who disagree (the vast majority) are all idiots. But you’ve yet to make a case.
No, I said the Internet is trash for these sorts of discussions because it's dominated by people with an agenda who blow things out of proportion.
These products are intentionally designed to be neck and neck. They're different, don't get me wrong. But they're all very close. Like a kid guessing the right answer on a math test. Things aren't the same, but the dumb fanboys who think that every Camry goes 500k on oil changes, every Tesla gets stuck in the shop forever, every American car handles like poo, etc, etc. Those idiots are wronger. You'd never be able to tell how different the cars are on those sorts of axis without fairly rigerous methods. And those people dominate the discussion.
> What are we missing out on?
You’d never know because you never had a choice in the first place
in a word, choice. also it's a much quieter car inside, despite being cheaper.
Freedom.
and what's the tesla equivalent for the BYD dolphin?
There's more than one brand of car available in America... so it would probably be the Chevy Volt, the nissan leaf, or hyundai kona
Competition. Lower prices. Better repairability.
A BYD seal is between $35k and $50k USD in various non US, non China countries that I checked Mexico, Germany, australia, Thailand.
Competition is great but it doesn't mean that the cars in America are bad. The lada was a failure of a car compared to other similar cars available elsewhere. That is not the case here.
I have one of the first runs of model 3s. It still runs perfectly. Great battery life. I'm happy with it. Nevertheless, I find it frustrating that I can't even consider buying a BYD as my next electric daily driver. Because when Tesla and BYD enter markets together Tesla is often getting creamed. That makes me curious as to why. This de-facto ban of BYD in the USA does nothing but encourage stagnation.
> That makes me curious as to why
The why part is easy - Tesla is about as outdated of a car as it gets, it is practically same car and there are only few options. I own 2014 Model S and my neighbour has 2025 Model S - it is the same car when you look at it. We also got Model 3 (from many years ago) which was then blown up a little into Model Y and we have X from a decade ago. These are ancient cars. The tech inside may have improved but the offering is basically for my grandparents now.
I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:
> massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects
The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.
The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.
It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.
There are two types of protectionism:
1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.
2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.
We all know which country chose which path.
Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.
Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.
We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”
We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.
And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.
> 1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy.
"Dynamic" is doing a hell of a lot of work there. I guess what you mean is steal technology from the west, undercut pricing on foreign goods and dump products in their markets to destroy the competition, end up being the last one standing, because you freely violate trade agreements (as a member of the WTO) and other treaties.
> " so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all type"
They have more coal power than the rest of the world combined, and are building more. Their "path to energy independence with their solar and wind" is purely propaganda.
>they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer
They're literally the sixth largest, just behind Iraq and ahead of Iran. I'm pretty sure people consider Iraq a "big oil producer", right? They also have the 13th most proven untapped oil reserves, and likely more than that since they're not in the business of oversharing.
Your first point is ironic considering Western tech companies are being taken to court for training AI off of pirated intellectual property. I’m not trying to be pro-China but I think this idea that “stealing” technology is exclusive to China is naive. There’s a whole classic Silicon Valley story about the development of the GUI at Apple and Microsoft on the subject. Steve Jobs was furious with Bill Gates when Windows debuted especially since Microsoft was a premier Macintosh developer.
It’s also a little bit ignorant of the existence of different cultural views of copying. Americans who love the second amendment wouldn’t want Europeans telling them to follow European gun laws, why should China follow Western IP laws?
The culture of copying and iterating in the Chinese hardware industry has proven to be incredibly good for innovation and healthy competition, just like open source has been incredibly good for the US software industry.
One example of Western IP ideology being stifling: 3D printing was artificially held back from consumers by patents on FDM printing. The moment those patents expired, prices dropped by two orders of magnitude. It’s easy to argue that Western IP laws result in oligopolies and monopolies forming as an inevitability.
Even if you don’t agree with that, the fact remains that many technology transfers to China are done willingly for payment (e.g., IBM PC division sold to Lenovo, Motorola Mobility sold to Lenovo, high speed rail technology was sold to China. Nobody twisted Volkswagen’s arm and demanded that they build factories in China and train local workforces on automotive production, that was done for the same profit-seeking reasons Toyota came to America and taught GM the Toyota Production System).
Leveraging their coal power for today and building wind/solar/battery for tomorrow is a smart strategy that pragmatically considers their current resource mix. Trump administration canceling already approved wind projects because he doesn’t like how his Scottish golf course has a view of them is not smart strategy.
China is not a big oil producer relative to their size and population. In that sense countries like the US, Canada, and Russia are far more energy secure.
> We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession.
Our gasoline risks hitting $6-7/gallon because of a war we needlessly started to distract from our leader's seemingly rapidly progressing dementia, his approval numbers that are the lowest since I think LBJ, oh, and him being named repeatedly in the files of a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker.
In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.
Right down to the shaky real estate markets.
China has surpassed the US in total energy generation, and the gap is growing in their favor every year.
Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.
I would certainly expect a country with 4x the population of the US, which is used as the center of global manufacturing, to need a lot of power.
I’m not sure that’s something that anyone should be concerned about from a geopolitical point of view. Likewise expecting Japan to have ever done the same is… silly.
You're not concerned about the biggest army in the world flexing its muscles?
If the size of an army represented a reliable measure of its ability to project power, we’d all be trembling at the might of North Korea.
Not really, china has never started a war and overall seems to understand it as a pointless yet necessary endeavour
China has 100% started wars. The Sino-Vietnamese War for starters.
Not in the same sense the US or Russia. The Sino-Vietnamese war was brief, about a month. Compare that to US or Russian wars. Now, Im not saying that China won't start wars since they've become a lot stronger. Just looking at it through a historic perspective.
I'm sure that the people of Tibet at the very least would feel strongly about the notion of a peaceful, non-expansionist China. You could ask the people of the Philippines as well, or for an admittedly more complicated answer the people of Japan and the RoK.
China is also happily supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, which makes the "not waging war" distinction a bit academic.
I never said they were peaceful and non-expansionist, just that it's unlikely they'd turn to war for those gains.
They also have fought wars, and my wording was admittedly bad. They haven't fought a serious war in a long time, and their military activity in general has been limited to a few border standoffs which I certainly wouldn't take as an indication of its willingness to fight for something like expansion
That's certainly a take. China just has this decades long history of targeting foreign industries, flooding the market with that product, and then being the only one left standing.
The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here, and the government backed goal of one side. Just the cost of labor alone makes that not an approachable thing to do.
On the reverse "bad" US side, we have more and more international auto manufacturers building and investing in factories in the US every year. Strangely, this decision involves billions of dollars and years of work to make happen. It's not based on internet vibes.
And the "renewable" growth is really kind of misleading. They're also building more coal power plants than the rest of the earth, combined, each year. They represent ~50% of the worldwide coal power in use today and produce roughly one third of the total CO2 in the world now, almost 3x that of the US.
But I guess the future is government funded undercutting of international competitors, using technology stolen by the government from those competitors, in order to destroy those competitors, while using very dirty and cheap energy to do so? Is that the lesson we're supposed to learn from them?
The US auto manufacturers could compete, they just don't want to.
They've played their own regulatory capture games here and have all but abandoned the concept of affordable small cars & EVs. They've decided to go all in on $80k luxury EVs and enormous trucks (while being protected by 25% tariffs on light truck imports), and the stupid CAFE footprint loophole.
Maybe if they'd stop flooding our streets with ridiculously sized vehicles and actually tried to compete, it would be a different story. They aren't even trying.
We are just as capable of offering subsidies, if thats what it takes, to make small affordable EVs.
It's what the USA did during its industrialisation, it's what Japan did during its industrialisation. If you are looking to history to find ways to make your country prosper and industrialise, wouldn't you take those examples since they panned out pretty well?
The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies, and helped flood the market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?
There's a lot of data around that in the history of the US and Japan?
For the first part, yep. Samuel Slater (known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" in the US, but "Slater the Traitor" in the UK) was the most well known example, but was also simply one piece of a large policy of ignoring European parents and encouraging people to come with 'stolen technology' to the US and make a competing company here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
Also, the Chinese are absolutely making a profit on their exports, so I'd question your "below cost" broad characterization.
> The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies... market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?
NSA spied on Airbus in the 90s and passed along information to Boeing and MacDonell Douglas - paving the way for the latter to win a Saudi deal, over Airbus. Further, Boeing airliner development is subsidized by military purchases of its jets by the US government. Its easy to forget that increasing the influence of and/or financially benefitting American champions falls under the auspices of "National interest"
See Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. Concern for IP tends to come _after_ a country develops.
American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A., and many (all?) of them required multiple government bailouts over the past few decades.
If you think that keeping China is good for the consumer, you'll have to present a stronger case than "we must protect our companies".
> If you think that keeping [out] China is good for the consumer
It would be excellent for the consumer, in the rather short term, to not keep them out. Cheap cars! Cheap goods flooding our markets are great for consumers in the short term.
> American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A
Here's a game:
One company is American. The other is not.
Company 1 Market Share: North America: 16.5% South America: 8.9% Asia: 7.6%
Company 2 Market Share: North America: 14.87% South America: 8.3% Asia: 8.28%
Now, without looking, which is the "US company without market share outside of NA", and which is the foreign company that understands how to compete?
Unfortunately, I looked, so let me add to this game, starting with the fact you omitted Europe:
Company 1: Europe ~0% (trucks & SUVs just don't sell well there it seems) Company 2: Europe 7%
Company 1: Manufactures in 8 countries, 2/3 of its factories are in North America. Company 2: Local production of cars in 25-30 countries depending on partnerships.
Company 1 data: 2025. Company 2 data: 2020 (?!)
Company 1 is the American one?
> The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here
We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.
The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.
I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.
BYD has to me become an icon of German decline vs Chinese expansion.
My view.
I was looking at a new car. Went into several car shops, VW, Skoda, Toyota and BYD.
And all of them were basically empty and BYD was FULL! Like really really full.
And the sales guy confirmed it, they are selling cars like crazy.
Which country was this in?
Well.. Germany :)
Must be EU somewhere, never seen a Skoda anywhere else.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights
The U.S. record on human rights is horrific, if you see it from a global perspective (which you should). China is a saint in comparison.
Many predicted it for a long time, the US will always be a great power, for structural and geographical reasons, but it won't keep the position it had for almost a century.
The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions, I don't foresee huge conflicts incoming, but I am a not entirely sure the US will manage to lost its position as gracefully as the British Empire.
It could be bad news for US citizens if their currency precipitiously lose its power, and they'll look for people to blame.
> The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions
One of the reasons China wants Taiwan is because it would enable further territorial expansions into The Philippines and Japan. China considers any neighboring Democratic nation a threat. Taiwan is just their first / easiest prospective target.
If you have access to PBS, there's a very good documentary that touches on this a bit called Invisible Nation.
It seems like BYD is a much bigger threat to Europe (specifically Germany) and Japan. The auto industry is big in the US but an insignificant amount of total exports. Germany and Japan could both lose their cash cows if the Chinese auto industry dominates international sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e...
That's not really like with like. If you divided the states in USA into countries, their sales would be "international". The designation is misleading.
The main point is that BYD is an existential threat to Germany and Japan. Per Wikipedia (List of countries by exports + List of countries by vehicle exports, latest available data):
- US: ~$144B vehicle exports / ~$3.23T total exports → ~4.5% - Germany: ~$280B / ~$1.99T → ~14% - Japan: ~$151B / ~$922B → ~16%
Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.
BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
And even more an icon of european irrelevance. In Prague almost all EVs are Teslas. I see a BYD time to time. Škoda or Volkswagen almost never.
No wonder, VAG has only produced overpriced cars for a while...
I recently helped a friend looking for a brand new SUV in the 70-80,000 euro range (taxes included) and the audi Q5 was both the most expensive and the worst built one in that price range.
We checked loads of cars and agreed that the volvo XC60 was arguably the best value for money, the BMW X3 was the one which drove the best (but also the most uncomfortable), the Lexus NX450h was the most comfortable and the best built, the Mercedes GLC was probably the most balanced one (although the value for money wasn't great).
The Audi Q5 only stood out for poor build quality and being overpriced. It's literally the only car which we didn't see an upside for, we didn't even bother to test-drive it... Also it seems they aren't very reliable anymore...
In the Netherlands I see plenty of Renault 5s or VW IDs, many Teslas, too. And almost no BYD
As a counterpoint, around 1/3 of EVs I see in France are Renaults. SImilar story, but a bit less evident, in Spain.
Both have decent amounts of Hyundai Ioniqs, Teslas, and some BYDs and Dacias. But especially in France, Renault Meganes, 5s and now the 4 is everywhere.
Don't forget that "Europe" is actually 30ish (if you count EU) or even more countries (if you count the continent), with wildly different markets and players on them.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
Just curious-- if you did say something about this, what would it be?
I would support allowing any Chinese automaker in the US if they form a 51:49 joint venture with an American company.
Wait, wasn't the free market supposed to be a superior system? You cannot at the same time argue that something is better and wish you didn't have it
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Or just China just deserve special treatment?
The problem the US has, at least in this area, is that it's manufacturing is in the dumps and that's not even plainly bad thing.
No US born child in the last 30 years aspired to working a factory job. The US is an advanced economy with advanced jobs. We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas.
I can tell you with first hand experience, that this problem is much deeper than "the US needs to catch up" because in reality what is happening is that China is the one playing catch up. The US is already 30 years into the endgame of economic development. China is where the US was 75 years ago, and on paper, the US has only progressed from that point.
> We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas
Generate wealth for whom, though?
That's also ignoring the entire economic underclass that system creates of service & gig workers that can no longer afford to live in the cities in which they work. Not everyone has the ability or desire for knowledge work.
The US still needs to catch up too. We have an infrastructure problem. Where is our high speed rail and public transit? Cycling infrastructure? Renewables? Housing in high demand areas? Socialized healthcare? Safety nets for said economic underclass?
We are behind in so many ways because we view wealth generation for the top xy% as the only metric of success.
> China is where the US was 75 years ago
Quite a wild claim
It's the progression of countries from agriculture economies to service economies. 1950's US was a manufacturing powerhouse with almost entirely in house supply chains and with heavy public infrastructure drives, not at all unlike China today.
But trust me, all those people working in poor conditions for cheap pay in China will do everything they can to ensure their kids don't work those jobs. And just like the US, that fountain of cheap labor will go away and everyone will want their comfy high paying desk job.
I don't mind restricting Chinese imports in principle, since China is well known to be very protectionist, moreso than Western countries for sure. Trade needs to be a two way street.
That said, it is indeed disappointing that we can't get their affordable EVs over here. Western legacy automakers really need a kick in the ass (especially since Tesla seems to just be phoning it in now).
With EVs, Tesla's the only one in the US not phoning it in. I used to think they were until I got a new Model Y Juniper.
I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.
But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.
Tesla still seems like they're phoning it in to me. Where's the generational refreshes? Where's the Model 2, or any new regular consumer models?
Obviously Rivian and Lucid don't have affordable cars yet, but they seem to be moving in that direction, and they're clearly still trying.
I'm hopeful about Slate, though obviously they haven't sold anything yet so it's just hope.
I do think they're missing an affordable SUV (something that's a true 3-row SUV like the Model X but cheaper). And Musk has teased something like that recently.
And Rivian is about to make an affordable SUV. So overall, I am hoping that there is a vibrant ecosystem of EVs from companies that actually understand software (as opposed to many EVs that have shitty software). Not sure about Lucid.
>Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
Here's to hoping their EV Maverick is still on track:
Ford Teases New Details About Its $30K EV Truck Coming Next Year
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a71204448/ford-ev-truck-fu...
How do you like Model Y so far? I am eyeing that and a Rivian. The newest Y design is great (outside) and the price is where I want it. But I can’t help thinking that it will break the second I complete my signature for purchase/lease.
I absolutely love it. I had a Model 3 for 7 years before that, and that car (at least in 2018) felt like a slightly beta car. Manufacturing was a bit shoddy in places, but still was an _awesome_ car to have for 7 years.
But the Model Y seems like they fixed everything I complained about with the 3. Smoother ride, everything feels higher quality, and FSD (if you can get it) is just amazing.
Anyway with Teslas, you feel like you're living 10 years in the future from everyone else on the road. But Full Self-Driving makes it feel even more stark.
Like I said, at the price points of the Model Y (at its quality), there aren't too many alternatives. At least in Sept 2025 when I looked. I wish there were.
I don't count BYD because I was never going to buy a BYD even if it was available, because of how deeply connected these cars are nowadays. Maybe it's irrational, but giving the growing drumbeat of some sort of conflict with China over Taiwan, it doesn't seem prudent to have a fully connected car phoning home to the CCP.
Price point is a major factor. I am looking at other EVs but can’t get over how expensive some are (e.g. Taycan). Now I know there is an argument that a Porsche drives nothing like a Tesla, and sure, I believe it. (I own a Boxster). But the price gap is huge.
Thanks for the insight. The more I look at the Y the more it moves closer to the top my list.
> Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
It’s cancelled.
So is the Chev Silverado EV.
The Chevy is not. A refresh was delayed
EV trucks don't work yet. The technology isn't there yet in this country. You can't tow.
You can tow. However you can't reasonably tow for any distance. You can probably even tow for most trips - but you will spend 1/3rd of the trip or more sitting at a fast charger in the best case (and in many cases the only charger is a level 2 chargers so many hours at the charger for every 1 driving)
??? There is such a thing as a cybertruck. It can tow better than any other truck.
> ??? There is such a thing as a cybertruck. It can tow better than any other truck.
Better than any other truck? I don't think so.
Better than any other EV truck? Unsure.
Or if we're still referencing that fully discredited "Cybertruck can tow a Porsche and still be faster than a Porsche", well: https://www.theautopian.com/a-cybertruck-towing-a-porsche-91...
I've had to rent cars a couple times the last year due to flight cancellations. Twice I got a corolla and was really impressed how nice they were, then I got an upgrade to a Cadillac. It had the lousiest transmission and the interior was covered in low quality feeling materials. Honestly at this point I would never buy American, sloppiest fit and finish I've seen.
One thing China did which was smart was to start training thousands of engineers about twenty years ago, about 10x the number of US engineering graduates. That's paying off now.
It was also a little sad to see the treatment of Tesla by Biden. It was the world's leading EV company at the time but he excluded from EV get togethers because he wanted the unionised companies like GM to win. I think that sort of thing - protecting mediocre incumbents that contribute to the right politicians didn't help. Musk was a dem at the time but after that flipped to Trump and went a bit off the rails.
No to me it just shows 2 different capital allocation strategies.
China picked manufacturing.
US picked datacenters.
The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong
If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)
Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...
[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...
> but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys
My point is that you can get that with ~1/1000th the compute we spend. The truly useful parts of the internet are a tiny fraction of the tech footprint. There's more net value for us in Wikipedia than there is in ~a trillion dollars of the more vapid tech firms. And it runs on 3m/year in hosting costs.
You are right that China has a food security problem, though. I am, however, assuming that its government isn't blind to it - the country is self-sufficient for high-calorie staples, and wouldn't starve even if all food imports stopped.
No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy
China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports
All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.
That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...
And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.
The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.
So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.
the US picked those because it was cheaper to move the others to china. It again shows that capitalism will inevitably die without colonialism
Yeah I think you added that before I edited my comment to say the same :-)
And yet we will do worse in both categories
US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)
Left in US sneer at technocrats but absolutely gobble up their products with gusto.
Even more so with public transport.
In 2008 China had 1,300km of high speed rail. In 2025 they had over 45,000km.
Meanwhile America has zero…. But is bringing back the V8! Ye-haw!
/insert star wars anakin and padme meme
Surely with the cost of fuel skyrocketing we'll pivot to public transit and non-fossil-fuel transport, right? Right?
Tesla would be considerably more popular globally if Elon kept his political opinions to himself and exaggerated capabilities and timelines a bit less.
Another thing overtaking the US is average IQ scores. Both in the current baseline and in rate of change. US has been declining, China has been increasing.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
To be very practical here… the lack of rights and freedoms as they exist in China typically has no consequence to the lives of individual people. For example you have no right to protest. But how many of us have exercised that right in the US? Personally I never did. And honestly those protests end up being just parties and parades
I see claims like this all the time on HN. Where is this data supposed to be coming from? When I look it up on Google, I get data ultimately sourced from shady online IQ tests (which nonetheless purport to provide a monotonic ranking of every country in the world from China to Nauru, despite the fact that virtually none of these countries collect IQ scores from their populations).
I have no reason to doubt that China is modernizing and improving their gross aptitude for knowledge work! The directional point you're making may very well be valid! I'm just wondering how anyone could be quantifying it in terms of "average IQ", a metric that generally does not exist.
I write my congressman every few months about something. Sometimes just to send a form letter that one of the various organizations writes for me. I also vote regularly.
You should too.
It makes sense to ban BUD imports but don’t you dare try and both sides this argument by saying EV and renewable power strategy are the same on both sides.
> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
The problem is, China isn't competing fairly!
As a Western manufacturer, bound to well-paying union labor and environmental protection laws, and restricted by the mechanisms of the free markets, you cannot compete with a country that employs all sorts of labor abuses (from complete ignorance about OSHA and its national equivalents over 996 work model to outright forced labor and slavery), completely wrecks its own environment and provides virtually unlimited financial funds to its companies in its quest to achieve dominance.
China is inarguably the biggest threat the entire rest of the world faces and barely anyone is even seeing the dangers.
How did it get here though? The west basically handed them everything on a plate and gutted the domestic industries for a quick profit. What next?
China harvests organs of muslims. China doesn't allow LGBTQ representation on public media. China forcibly married uyghur women to handle men. It's important to remember the whole global picture before we take sides.
> China doesn't allow LGBTQ representation on public media.
And several US states are inching closer to making being some of those letters, particularly the T, outright illegal.
Seeing as how you ignored mybm other points but instead presented a hypothetical future for comparison, i imagine you don't care or support muslims
Sounds like wishful and biased thinking, but enjoy your updoots
It's like what happened in the 80's with japanese cars. Except, America's poised to become a oligarchy and will absolute just punch itself in the face rather than let the oligarchy suffer.
lmao. "religious nationalism"? What are you referring to here? The USA's new tighter immigration standards? What pray tell is China's immigration policy? Ignorance? Are you referring to perhaps San Francisco progressives eliminating enhanced schooling because it makes some students feel bad about themselves?
https://www.educationnext.org/san-franciscos-detracking-expe...
Fear? Oh I know, you are talking about how in blue states they can't even build simple housing never mind mega projects like high speed rail and that's why red states are acquiring population and capital at accelerating speeds.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/why-nothin...
those mega projects are almost always killed by republicans. also, listen to the rhetoric around christianity in republican circles and tell me it isn't religious nationalism
>innovating
Right.
Refining already invented things is 'innovation'.
that's what most innovation is. the model T wasn't the first car. it was the car that was sufficiently refined to take over.
We have very different definitions of innovation.
Respondants:
Please, stop lying on the internet. It's not healthy. Stop making things up.
Source:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
Making cars faster or cheaper isn't an "innovation". Making a flying car is innovation. Inventing the car is invention.
Systematic government-aided intellectual property theft, lax labor laws, low wages and low standards of living aren't innovative.
The word you are looking for is "invention". Innovation instead means exactly refining and improving existing things.
Your understanding of the situation is over a decade out of date. The Chinese are outright innovating at this point, they are well past the copy-paste stage. If you'd like to catch up, this is a good place to start:
https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos
And btw, they are making flying cars as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBp96YGStIQ
Victim of propaganda.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but it actually is.
38.9% of BYDs direct profits are from subsidies. Tesla subsidies expired already… if we are going to judge on equal footing China is subsidizing a much bigger part of BYDs sales.
From my understanding China did have subsidies for EVs but that expired last year.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...
Really? I think 38.9% of statistics without sources are made up.
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
Coal is still the majority of generation capacity [1] in China and China continues to build a lot more coal [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...
> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion
Is this supposed to help virality or something? "US decline"?
Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.
This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.
The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme. I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction. Sure China's trajectory is good.
But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capita than the US and it's still quite far from that. Let's talk about reality here. The US shouldn't rest on its laurels, but we need to be real about where we are not how we feel
A lot can change. This administration has 2.5 years left. I'm tired of Reddit and Twitter doom-based virality hacks subsuming every net forum.
> But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capita than the US and it's still quite far from that.
China has significantly lower co2 emitted per capita than the US already. Per kWh no, but that's a different thing. AFAICT China's renewable growth is now outpacing demand growth significantly though, so that per-capita gap will widen, and the per kWh is steadily improving as well, and faster than the US.
For some concrete numbers: China added 400GW of renewables in 2025 vs 78 GW of coal generation. Reduced CO2 intensity of power grid by 5% vs US 3% drop. In 2025 US total power emissions went up 5% (for many reasons, but arguably high gas prices and lots of data centres) while China total power emissions dropped 1.5%
All the details make China's path look much cleaner than the US's.
> China has significantly lower co2 emitted per capita than the US already. Per kWh no, but that's a different thing.
Sorry I meant per kWh not per capita.
I don't disagree that China's path looks cleaner than the US right now, but also think "US decline" is viral hyperbole. It's the kind of thing people use on Twitter to get everyone to start discussing something. It's the kind of thing people say on Reddit all the time to add a doomer emotional valence on their comment. I want HN to be better than that but it's obviously not.
The US has been losing in the automotive market for decades now, with Japanese brands hitting 25% penetration in the '80s, the Korean brands starting in the '90s, and by 2020 Asian brands making up roughly 45% of the market. US automakers are staying afloat in the CAFE-exempt space of light trucks.
It's true that this administration has been hostile to renewables, notably shutting down offshore wind. But I'm not sure what this has to do with "decline". In 2.5 years we'll have a different admin. There's already pressure to electrify cars with high gas prices thanks to the Hormuz crisis.
Where's the "decline" bit? What does it mean to "decline"? I maintain that it's largely bait to fish for upvotes and engagement.
> In 2.5 years we'll have a different admin
This administration is attempting - and mostly succeeding - in "Dismantling the administrative state". They even provided a handy checklist (project 2025). That shit won't bw undone in 2.5 years.
> The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme.
The difference is the US's hostility to renewable energy versus China's embrace of it. China's path takes them to zero coal eventually - the US's does not.
That's assuming the governments, policies, and economic conditions of China, US, and the world in May 2026 stay static.
I can't see China changing course. They're all in on renewables for energy independence. It's already the cheapest source of energy. They're exporting panels and batteries everywhere too.
I hope the US does change policies.
China can continue to rely on coal for energy independence also. We're seeing this as countries that depended on LNG started firing coal plants again with the Hormuz crisis in effect. As a strong believer in climate change, it's admirable that China is innovating in renewables, but it's not a prerequisite for energy independence. They're already facing anemic job growth and overbuilt infrastructure capacity. If the government wants to redirect investment and spending elsewhere, they can switch back to coal plants rather than necessarily turning on renewables.
Manufacturing and shipping EVs I agree is going nowhere because they continue to be the leader and an increasing number of developing and underdeveloped countries are finding it easier to light up electrical sources than import oil.
> China can continue to rely on coal for energy independence also.
At the cost of air quality. People are getting used to cleaner air. It's hard to go back.
Also the more solar they use, the more coal they can keep around for emergencies. The sun is free energy.
In 2025 China recorded a decline in generation from coal for the first time ever. [1]
1. https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/#data
> I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction.
It's literally just a mind virus and folks hear it on the news and like the Chinese hypersonic missiles they just hear some capability or reporting and then don't know what to do with it except to parrot it.
They don't think about China's lying down culture [1], for example, ghost cities and over-building doesn't seem to phase them [2] (communism tends to waste a lot of money and drive economic inefficiency), China's over-capacity for manufacturing and now struggling to find markets for goods [3], local corruption, disappearing of folks who disagree with their government, and more. Even with respect to infrastructure. Yea they built a lot. Good luck maintaining it at an affordable cost. China has more manpower to do literally throw bodies at the problem, but economic physics will still win out and China's declining population and demographic crises and xenophobic culture don't help.
Now, with that being said, China has done some absolutely amazing and wonderful things. But we shouldn't confuse China's progress with a corresponding American decline. Instead, the more sophisticated model is looking at both American and Chinese progress while other nations, and the EU are struggling.
Yeah I see that we're entering a multipolar world, where China and the US form 2 dominant poles but other countries/alliances like India and the Gulf States create stiff competition. A world with more prosperity for more people seems good to me.
> A world with more prosperity for more people seems good to me.
Agree with that sentiment absolutely. I’m not totally sure that is a given, however. The primary reason being that as America declines economically from the post-war boom, it no longer has the resources to simultaneously fight or contain many belligerent actors (Russia, Iran, China, &c.) and without the other dominant power (China) stepping up to assist in what I would loosely describe as a bipartisan way we are likely to see more conflict, not less, in my view.
As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones
> As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
That's how China was able to compete: banning America from contesting the market.
> As an american i feel it
How do we have a productive discussion about our feelings on a tech site?
You start with a non-sequitur on China using coal to generate electricity.
Because that, too, is feelings. In this case, insecurity.
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
EDIT: thanks I didn't realize I forgot to add the context of my original reply to the post. Edited it to add context.
This site is fascinating place for me, especially comment section. Sometimes, visibly smart folks end up shooting their own feet with things like oversized egos, unwillingness to entertain any idea contrary to their already-held beliefs and many others. Makes me more humble and lowers my expectations of humanity, while in the same time giving me more hope for the future.
Bizzare mix, but pretty fun with controversial topics
This feels like subtweeting (vaguely referencing bad behaviors in this thread without naming anything or anyone) so I'm curious what you're going for with this comment.
As much as coal is bad for the environment, eliminating it completely isn't a great idea. It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/
Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.
> It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start
Doesn't hydropower count for like half of our black start capability?
> Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.
Wind farms and PV both can use batteries to support black start capability.
Would be great if we could buy/drive these in the US. Funny how we have a "free market" only when it is convenient for certain interests...
They're all over the place in Mexico City. It'll be interesting as these EVs start to show up along the northern and southern borders traveling within the US.
WSJ had a piece on just this recently.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...
The sad reality is how politically influential it will be for Americans to take a Chinese EV from the airport to a hotel in Cancun and say, "Why don't we have this in the US?"
Saw some in southern Arizona, had to do a double-take.
That was me with Polestar like 4 years ago but really don't see many of them anymore in the PNW
I agree that that would be great as a consumer, but given how protectionist China is, you can hardly blame countries for responding in kind. Trade should be a two way street.
Doesn't Tesla have a factory in China?
They do. The Chinese government gave them a special exemption, presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise. Other foreign auto companies are not allowed to open their own factories in China; they have to do a joint venture with a local manufacturer.
>presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise
Worked with Apple!
They do. Because Elon is proving himself to be quite an idiot.
China was more than happy to welcome him in, and have him teach them how to build an EV. They simply copied what they could and improved on it.
"The communists will happily sell the capitalists the rope the capitalists hang themselves with"
BYD has been making batteries since '95, cars since '05, plug-in hybrids since '08 and EVs since '09. I don't doubt that China may have made use of Musk, but I severely doubt he's the one who "taught them how to build an EV".
If you think China can only make stuff by copying what other does, you're gonna under-estimate them.
The timing doesn't line up. BYD has already been selling EVs by the time Tesla opened a factory in China. Heck, they were selling EVs even before _Tesla_ existed.
And they clearly have their own expertise. There are videos of BYD and Tesla car teardowns, and you can see that they quite differ in design philosophies.
I think China was more interested in creating more competition internally, rather than just ripping off the technology.
It’s other capitalists that stole the tech. China is a country of capitalists living under a communist regime.
capitalists the communists put up with because it's better for communism in the long run
> it's better for communism in the long run
"Communism" is a theoretical concept. The CCP is what they are protecting, an authoritarian power structure.
the CCP exists to build communism
I mean, that's the marketing material. Once Xi declared himself emperor for life, that marketing material fell apart a bit, didn't it?
How is modern China even close to theoretical "communism?" It's certainly not Marxist, right?
it follows marxist principles and is building towards communism, which isn't overnight. It's currently in a socialist stage. Also, Xi is closer to the captain of a ship rather than an absolute monarch. He has a lot of power, yes, but that's because the party trusts him, not because he demands it
In the age of Mao, wasn't it closer to Marxism? There are more billionaires in China now, then there were back then. By that I mean, the wealth disparity in China is at an all-time high now, is it not? Xi removed the 2-term limit from his own position, and has been doing an excellent job at consolidating his power base, through all means necessary.
Disclaimer: I believe that pure "capitalism" and pure "communism" are marketing terms which both lead to authoritarianism, aka the "Horseshoe Theory of politics." To me, the natural end-state, if we survive the extremists is Social Democracy. However, it's boring and everyone appears to find the extremes far more exciting.
China was completely mucked up economically under Mao, especially around the cultural revolution. I went there in 1983 when GDP per capita was like $300 and it was a bit prison camp like. It's changed a lot.
I was not there, but I believe that history shows that you are correct. I am not trying to sell Mao at all. If anything, he is a yet another ideological-extremist cautionary tale. (yet again, killed millions of his own people through poorly thought out absolutism)
Until Xi, China appeared to be moving in a good direction.
>In the age of Mao, wasn't it closer to Marxism?
Not really, marxism is a way of looking at the world, not an economic system in itself
>There are more billionaires in China now, then there were back then
They hadn't even built capitalism fully, so it makes sense that there was less capital
>By that I mean, the wealth disparity in China is at an all-time high now, is it not?
it is, and they're currently working on how to deal with that
>Xi keeps remove the 2 term limits from just position, and has been doing an excellent job at consolidating his power base, through all means necessary.
Sure, but that's just politics. Ultimately if the majority of the party had a problem with him he wouldn't be in power for long before a coup or a request for him to step down happened
That's the biggest joke.
It's not. China has literally _thousands_ of years of bureaucratic institutional memory. And it just keeps perpetuating itself.
Before the 20-th century, the Chinese officials had to study the classic Chinese literature and pass exams based on that knowledge. These works were completely abstract and literally useless in day-to-day work. And you had to follow all the rituals to demonstrate your allegiance and being-in-the-group.
Now they just swapped the Classical Chinese works with Marxist writings. Nobody cares about their content, but you have to know them and you have to follow the rituals.
I fail to see how both can't be true. It demonstrates your allegiance to the parties main goal (communism) and filters out those who oppose it
For anyone that doesn't know, then president Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law in 1988 that banned all car imports into the US unless the car is at least 25 yaers old.
Why? Because US Mercedez-Benz dealers were selling their cars at too high a price and a lot of Americans were importing them directly from Germany. So the dealers associations lobbied Congress for a ban.
Country of free markets, by the way.
This is entirely misleading and misinformation -- only those not meeting all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).
Free market does not exist
Or rather, it exists briefly until it is naturally captured by the biggest players.
Just buy a Textron golf cart and you have 90% of the Chinese EV experience.
Are you saying all cars that are manufactured in China are rubbish? Because that is just plain wrong.
It's the same propaganda that was used against Japan and Korean cars. Asia = bad, America = good.
https://electrek.co/2026/04/27/byd-seal-08-blade-battery-2-1...
https://ezgo.txtsv.com/
is there even a screen?
Traveling in Asia and South America, the primary impression I got was not that this is a war of manufacturing that we're losing but that the game is already up. Chile was full of Chinese makes and they were all surprisingly good. Riding in a Chinese MG in Taiwan or Hong Kong you suddenly realize that this isn't a future competitor. The people talking about the war of car manufacturers here seem like those Japanese holdouts who were still fighting in 1956.
Come to Australia. About two years ago there was so many Teslas. In the space of two years, I've seen twice as many BYDs. I can only imagine this will continue.
It's not "surprisingly" unless you haven't bought much in the last 20 years.
China-owned brands are now often better and more premium than their Western counterparts across the entire spectrum. Give me Anker over Belkin any day. There are a few areas where the West still leads - Chinese software tends to be buggier and less polished, luxury apparel isn't at the same standard - but that lead is diminishing rapidly. Customer service could still do with some improvement: it's usually much slower and less professional, but the trade-off is it's not uncommon to end up talking to an actual engineer who can investigate and solve the problem rather than just follow a script, even at a huge company.
The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
> The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
Stanley Black&Decker?
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/
Yeah the game is already lost. The question is how long the US can keep dumb laws that don't acknowledge reality. Unfortunately that timespan is 249 years and counting apparently.
Tesla has no moat.
BYD makes better EVs & is leading in battery tech.
FSD has been promised forever & not delivered. Now Musky says - for cars to have real FSD they need to be newer hardware tech.
Robotaxis - Waymo is better.
It has nothing to be about moat. It's about its older car brands and oil so much that it doesn't stay competitive.
Jensen Huang says that the same thing can happen to NVIDIA. Tinygrad is stopping exporting Blackwell based cards to most countries except the 10 Tier 1 countries, as all others need a few months of paperwork. Huawei GPUs don't have these export restrictions.
> BYD ... is leading in battery tech.
Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech. I know that isn't a short scale by tech standards but has BYD, and others, really leap-frogged that much?
I'm not in that space myself and do not keep up with EV benchmarks but am curious what advances or other changes were made. I recall reading Ford battery technology was also very good but interpreted that to be due to general advances in EV battery technology across the board rather than any one specific make/manufacturer.
BYD is one of Tesla's battery suppliers.
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/22/teslas-switch-to-byd-batteri...
Interesting I had no idea, thanks.
> Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech.
It seems logical that if someone was going to surpass Tesla in battery tech, it'd be a battery company. BYD has, after all, been making batteries since its founding under the name "Shenzhen BYD Battery Company" 30 years ago.
BYD has its own "God's Eye" self-driving tech, and unlike Musk's pigheaded insistence on cameras only, BYD is incorporating LIDAR into their cars across the range:
https://thedriven.io/2026/01/11/byds-cheapest-electric-cars-...
> LIDAR
You still believe that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLgCJUeBuI
Cool collection of self driving edge cases, thanks. How are any of them related to Waymo using or not using a particular sensor, LIDAR or otherwise?
There are plenty of FSD failure examples on YouTube too. I don't think you can draw conclusions from that. Especially because FSD isn't actually driverless yet, unlike Waymos.
FSD clocked in 10billion miles, not in some geofenced playground mind you.
You should be able to share some videos?
LOL, have you driven one?
Other than nice alcantara interior the drive is just a mush and software is awful (BYD Sealion 7). Older ones (i.e. Atto 3) were obsolete from the factory.
I got to sit in Zeekr 7x yesterday (top 3 in NZ by sales in April), hopefully I can get a test drive soon. It actually has every feature Tesla has (and more). Will be interesting to see how they actually execute.
Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.
Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.
[1] https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
I see a lot more Kia’s but I think it’s shifting because dealerships are shifting. The Toyota dealership near me now sells Jaecoo, Cherry, etc. and I am seeing tons of the Jaecoo SUV cars around. The Pentagon Vauxhall dealership I bought my car from keeps emailing me about BYDs.
I see plenty of BYD around, but I see more Kia cars. Maybe I'm biased with my EV6 GT Line S, but I wouldn't swap it for a damn thing.
Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.
There is a significant amount of BYD buses here in Spain, I don't live in Madrid but I go every now and then and I noticed a fair amount of electric BYD.
Also this is anecdotal, but I live in a small province capital (<100k citizens) and the urban planning councilor told me most likely most of the new buses we're getting next year will be electric and they'll probably be either BYD or eCitaros.
The thing that surprised me the last time I was in Uruguay (2022) was riding an ICE BYD. I had only ever seen electric BYDs.
Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.
I'm sure BYD and other Chinese EVs would dominate here too if it wasn't for tariffs.
BYD UK import tariff is 10%
BYD US import tariff is 100%
Canada reduced theirs to 6.1% from 100% about a month ago.
I wonder what happens if someone from the US buys one in Canada and just drives it home? At what point and how do they get charged an import tariff? When they register it?
AFAIU, import duties aren't really something you're necessarily "charged" as much as it's something you have a legal obligation to pay. Sure, maybe you could buy a car in Canada and bring it in to the US without paying the tariffs... we call that smuggling.
It's hardly smuggling if there is no process to collect the duties from you. Are you meant to walk into a random local government office and hand them a bunch of cash and say "i think i owe you this" ?!
What if it's a used car, not new, what's the tariff then?
I can't believe there is no process to collect it if you import it just by driving across the border.
I don't know how the US does it, but at least where I'm from, major border crossings (be it a road or an airport or something else) typically always have a place you can go to declare goods you're importing. That's where you're typically expected to, well, declare your goods. I imagine they don't see many people just driving there and saying "Hi, I'm here to declare this car I'm in", but I don't see why it shouldn't work...
Why should Australians or Dutch people have loyalty to foreign car industry? Who killed Holden or DAF? It wasn't BYD lol.
You should be loyal only to the extent that the loyalty helps some interests of yours. That is if the car industry ensures military equipment should you need it. (or alternatively you are going to war and don't want them to have the expertise that a car industry has).
For those not paying attention to geopolitics, Taiwan is the real concern here. China wants to control them, and is building a strong military. How the future will play out I don't know, but this should be your concern.
Isn't the concern with over the air updates and back-doors? As in, if the citizens in county A buy country B's cars, and now there is a tiff between the two countries, country B could potentially brick all of those vehicles in country A.
That is just another variation of geopolitical worry. Nobody will do this unless there is a geopolitical situation happening. If you are going to war then bricking the enemies cars is useful. Otherwise it is harmful (even if you do it accidentally you lose trust and so nobody will buy from you again - which is why so often rollouts are done slowly - if it doesn't work you only have a few customers affects and can spend more than a car's value on techs to fix them thus ensuring you don't lost reputation)
also, DAF was large in a very specific time in a very specific place. Let's not forget that the dutch car industry has always being dependant on german car industry.
The point of China's mercantilist and imperialist games with electric cars, is to attack and kill Western industry, and deprive us of the ability to defend ourselves.
I'm no fan of China but is it totally unimaginable to you that a country might just want to be successful?
Ive seen soo many BYD cars in the UK in the last year.
I'm not in the market for a new car, but anyone who has looked recently what is the draw to BYD? Is it strictly value/price?
Value, performance, quality, and not being associated with Elon.
Quality? I'm really interested into hard and extensive data about mechanical (drivetrain, suspension, brakes, etc...) engineering and quality control that would make me put them on the same level as the Japanese.
Lacking that, I must hold the preemptive view that they cut corners at least as much as the average make/
BY*D
*except Elon’s
Yes, they are (were) significantly cheaper than similar western cars.
Have their share of problems thought. IIRC climate control is often subpar.
Value price for us. The Sealion 7 for us had the combination of features, dimensions, range, 800v platform, for a price that was simply unbeatable (leasing).
Out of question that Volvo ex90, Kia ev9, Hyundai Ioniq 9 or even the BMW ix3 would have come on top if it wasn’t for the price.
> 800v platform
Ones in NZ are 400v and tops at 150KW charging.
> With over 7% market share, BYD is now the top-selling EV brand in the UK so far in 2026
But worldwide it has been for a while, no? I think total EV cars sold in 2025 BYD was top, if I remember correctly.
I think Tesla just beat them on pure EV because BYD sell a lot of hybrids too.
Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg
Tesla severely lacks competition in the North American market. They lost all their first mover advantage by sitting back and spending significant R&D into FSD. Chinese manufacturers have some incredible innovations such as Nio’s battery swapping.
Is volume or revenue/profit/margin etc? Quite important to know this.
I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.
I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.
In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).
I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).
I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.
It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.
I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).
I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K
Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.
Own the sealion 7. It is feature full, and don’t want to crush your dreams, but i would trade that killer unreliable adaptive cruise control and lane assist with a (missing?!) simple speed limiter 100 times over
I don’t mind the honesty.
Price is so good that even if it’s a little lacking in this regard, I’ll probably still be very happy as a lot of the features are just a bonus.
Important for us was that it’s bigger as we have two growing kids, and that it is essentially an electric that we can plug in to charge.
I’ve only ever used simple cruise control on my CVT Fit and before that on a manual. On the BYD test drive (on my own chosen route) the cruise control seemed to work at least as well as what I was used to and the adaptive in traffic was impressive (to me whose never before had it), but was just one drive so will see how I feel after driving it for a while.
Also, I certainly wouldn’t count on it, but it’s conceivable that a software update could improve things, my honest hunch though is that it would be very unlikely.
My SO bought an Ioniq 6 mostly because of the buttons and the seperate control surface for AC and such but they test drived a BYD as well which was the same as a Tesla, just one huge tablet and endless menus
Where/how can we buy a BYD in the US?
You can't buy them in the US. You could buy one in Mexico and drive it across the border, but you wouldn't be able to register it in the US. It is probably possible to legally import one but it would be very expensive and time-consuming, and you'd need to know a lot about import law.
AFAIK if its registered in Mexico it can be driven in US under temporary import permit. I've seen the odd Hilux or other new rarity that way. Quite common to see Mexico plates here in AZ in all number of cars not available for sale.
Currently the “best” way is to wait until they’re 25 years old and import them.
You won't get past step one: vote for political candidates who will fight for free markets.
You really think BYD would exist in a free market?
China and USA can fight it out propping up BYD and Tesla instead of Norinco and Lockheed Martin.
I saw this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS_fJJxMjn4
TL;DR Byd is amazing and fatally flawed. The details are too much to place here.
Why has BYD stock been trundling along? They seem like they are so far ahead: incredible blade batteries with ridiculous power density (fast charging)/efficiency/cooling, while being structurally useful (mad cool). And mad popular. I feel like I'm missing something that this company is doing such amazing good work but the stock isn't really moving.
BYD is ahead in the export game, but they're struggling in their home market, where the competition is furious and margins low.
Well their forward P/E is double Ford or Toyota, so presumably people think that's what their profit trajectory is worth.
Proof that if the price is right, you can look past anything.
Some amusing comments from Americans in this thread
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
> The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.
Ummm remember Guantanamo? Lol.
BYD ships
USA boomer car companies run a competition on who can build the biggest crappy SUVs around sold to other boomers who now look aghast at pump prices
Europe boomer car companies can't overrun their nit-pickiness and analysis paralysis and wonder why consumers are picking the car with screens that actually work like a modern device and don't have subscription horns or some other BS like that
The complacency of American, Euro and Japanese auto manufacturers as Chinese, through domestic hyper competition and protectionism. Is going to be an MBA case study on how to fumble the bag.
I will always wonder what Tesla could have been, hadn’t Musk gone completely off rails around the time he was presenting the cybertruck’s vision. Remember when it was pitched at 40-50k?
This is not surprising as other manufacturers continue moving away from producing cheap cars. One notable exception is dacia.
For all the China lovers here it's not a clear sign of Chinese superiority. I saw a video on youtube recently exploring BYD. It's success is due to the fact that the Chinese government as part of their plan to dominate the global car industry gives them massive amounts of money. Which manufacturer can compete with that? European tariffs in the near future looks likely.
Among other things the video explores some of BYD's shadier practices including artificially inflating domestic sales and not paying suppliers for up to 9 months.
I have my doubts whether their success is sustainable.
I hear this all the time, but I would point out that US car manufacturers are heavily subsidized as well. I’m sure other countries do their own things that effectively subsidize their automotive industries as well.
NAFTA and its successor keeps a lot of automotive production and assembly in North America.
The chicken tax protects American manufacturers from foreign competition on trucks and vans.
Tesla was started on the foundations of inexpensive loans and a “free” factory courtesy of government economic stimulus.
GM was bailed out and briefly owned by the federal government, saved by below-market rate loans.
Stellantis is also an organization that owes its existence on a bankruptcy bail-out package.
The US financially incentivizes car usage, period. They underfund transit projects, allow the gas tax rate to lag inflation, make zoning laws that require car ownership, and more. One great way to subsidize car companies is to make car ownership mandatory.
State and local governments frequently give tax incentives to major assembly plants in the name of preserving jobs for their constituents. For example, GM had a $60 million tax break to keep the Lordstown, OH plant open. Some of this was clawed back after the plant closed anyway.
CAFE standards incentivize manufacturers to build SUVs that aren’t practical or popular in many other markets, essentially enshrining America-specific car design, further separating the American market from global car designs. Companies like BYD can’t compete with American cars if they don’t sell models that resemble popular choices like the Ford F-150, which are designs which would be completely insane if sold in the Chinese, Japanese, and European markets.
Ok but we are talking about tens of billions versus tens of millions. And some good old fashioned protectionism which has limited effect on the global market which we are discussing at the moment.
Don't forget their rampant channel-stuffing, which is so flagrant, that it makes Ford's and GM's channel-stuffing antics look like kindergarten games in comparison.
It's a shame their cars are being devoid of its own identity. If you squint you might think it's an Audi or Range Rover.
A bit like wearing Adiboss or Gacci clothes. Nothing wrong with that.
Hopefully BYD will make something original and with style on its own.
But counter example is e.g. new Audi look like Kia.
Funny.
It is a car. Don't hang your personally identity on a car. Many people fail at this, but it is wrong.
Or at least if you do make sure it isn't your transportation. Drive something else most of the time that you don't care about so your identity car isn't scratched. Bring the identity car to a parade with the "pork queen" or whatever.
The chinese are utilitarian but also, like anyone, care about aesthetics. Why make something that looks good enough when that isn't your main goal and the jobs already been done
Strange comment, look at some of the cars here - many are unique and more creative liberty than anything the West is putting out:
https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos
steal this startup idea:
you can't buy BYD in the USA (thanks to Biden actually, not current admin)
BUT
there's a loophole to have a car from Canada in the USA for a year
so lease them from Canada to USA buyers for a year at a time
It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.
Provided they are available in Canada. There’s only roughly 50k imports in the first year and that will be split across all Chinese manufactured EVs (not necessarily Chinese brands). I assume the majority will be Teslas from their Shanghai factory.
I expect that the US administration will very quickly ban these cars from being leased or resold into the US from Canada.
...if they're not banned from entering the USA altogether, which seemed to be the way the US President was leaning already.
I think that if you maintain a policy, it becomes yours too.