China is not state-subsidized / running at a loss on materials so much (although they probably get cheaper rare earth minerals) - they're running at a loss on wages. There's no "loss" there - the state doesn't have to buy labor and sell it to the companies to put into the product at a loss - the companies simply pay less overall in terms of labor, because that's the prevailing rate.

Even if you paid 5% more for materials for an iphone but could pay 50% less for labor than China, you could probably beat China.

How does the state sponsoring come in? The state represses the people and the wages and prevents them from leaving for greener pastures in many cases, which benefits the corporations.

Sorry to cause fatigue.

The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.

> It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.

With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.

Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.

This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)

And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.