Yeah, there was a lot more mentorship in the industry back them.

> Say what you want about China's monoparty system, but it enables planning that spans decades.

That's not a trait of a monoparty system, or even any totalitarian autocratic system. There are democratic multiparty systems which have plans that spans decades, and autocratic totalitarian regimes that barely put together a coherent multi-year project.

I don't think this case has much to do with the mono party system but with the state taking interest to support a local industry at a loss but for future security.

Like for example the French government massively supported its aerospace and nuclear industry, and German government gave massive support to its legacy auto industry and they're not a mono party totalitarian system.

So it can be done even in democracies, but you need visionary leaders to spend money wisely on future industry bets and not just on buying votes from pensioners.

The big issue EU now has compared to the past when it kickstarted its nuclear and aerospace industry, is the massive burden of the welfare state that leaves little money for investments into other ventures, and boomers who are the largest beneficiaries of that welfare state, also account for the majority of the voter base, so the major EU economies France and Germany are stuck in a quagmire where the party who wins the elections is the one who goes more into debt for the welfare state.

EU has 7 years planning interval. Is not bad and tends to overlap the usual 4 years legislature in member countries.

>Those are typically very low margin business. It's unlikely the EU could have competed with China because of labour costs/rights.

Well, you can apply this logic to a lot of other industries, like cars for example, they're also quite low margin products now when you ignore the stealership price gouging and artificail protectionism. The problem is if you just let all your manufacturing industry die out of greed and ship it aboard to cheaper labor, you're leaving yourself exposed to geopolitical rivals or even to allies who decide not be your allies anymore because they know they got you by the balls now and can squeeze concessions out of you. <flashbacks of EU's energy ties with Russia>

Then what do you do?

China is willing to play and loose the short game in order to win the long game, while EU is only focused on the short term gains while it's been slowly bleeding leverage and influence to rivals in critical sectors that you can't easily reshore back on a whim in case of another once-in-a-lifetime pandemic or "special military operation".

China's EV success didn't come out of nowhere, it just leveraged all the low margin electronics industry the west didn't want anymore and shipped to CHina, and look at their EV industry versus the EU one today.

Same with Taiwan's success in the semi industry. They started by manufacturing on the cheap dated processes acquired from Philips and RCA, and look at TSMC now.

We're not talking about outsourcing manufacturing of cheap clothes and sneakers here. DRAM, NAND and micro-electronics in general is quite an indispensable part of or modern civilisation and defense now, even without the AI bubble. The longer you ignore your domestic capabilities because the profits aren't as high as you want, the harder it's gonna bite you in the ass later when the shit hits the fan.

China doesn't need licences. They can just violate western IP law and make lots of money. As every country without a need to placate the IP industry does.

Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp. (YMTC) (NAND)

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) (DRAM)

CXMT (dram) and YMTC (nand).