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.
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.
To expand your fortune relatively other people have to lose. Its required.
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.
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.
Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.
Good luck suing the White House, sovereign immunity basically makes this impossible in most cases.
Trump has that control and supreme court will support his project 2025 consistently.
I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.
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.
>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
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.
[0] actual conservatism, not the dishonest use of the label by reactionaries/fascists to cover for their radical agenda
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.
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.
Billionaires are problematic by their very existence, but the sort of power they want is what the CCP has. They want to use their capital to build that. Trump's having the best luck so far. If there are people who also just happen to be extremely wealthy who get in their way, they'd gladly use the power they then had to get rid of them. Alex Karp would be a good example of this sort of aspirational melding of the state and capital.
In a way, the CCP is beyond someone with a lot of money being able to do anything about it, which would be nice, except for the fact that they're totalitarian.
This is a much different model. Yes, the CCP has the sort of power that elite authoritarians crave, but it also has constraints and demands that no elites would ever face.
I would add that China also executes quite a few government officials for corruption and bribery. Estimates based on reporting suggest that about 25 Chinese officials each year are executed for this, and over 200,000 have been prosecuted in serious criminal trials, often with multi decade prison sentences or even life sentences. Again, the contrast with Western permissiveness is stunning.
As far as the execution of government officials for bribery, they also do quite a bit of other enforcement action that "Western permissiveness" just wouldn't tolerate, like sending ordinary people - not billionaires or cadre members - to re-education camps for wrongthink.
China’s government is likewise not accountable to or easily fit into the framework of “a market”, for reasons not the least of which include it being explicitly anti-capitalist. Wealth hoarding does not accumulate political power in China, and those who attempt this play can and regularly do find themselves put back in their place - possibly a prison or a crematorium.
As for re-education “camps”, the US imprisons approximately 10% of its population - a huge number by any standards historical or contemporary - and virtually none of these are billionaires or governing elites, who are functionally immune to the systems of authority that “rehabilitate” regular Americans.