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.

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strictnein 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	dangus 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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FireBeyond 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.