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>Even after becoming the world's largest panel maker, the company continues to lean heavily on government subsidies. In 2019, BOE received $400 million in subsi

>Even after becoming the world's largest panel maker, the company continues to lean heavily on government subsidies. In 2019, BOE received $400 million in subsidies from various Chinese local and provincial governments. Per Chinese sources, from 2010 to 2019, they took in over $1.7 billion of subsidies - constituting over 50% of their net profit during this time. This is why legislation such as the CHIPS Act should not be seen as corporate welfare but rather as leveling the playing field.

markdown 5y ago
> This is why legislation such as the CHIPS Act should not be seen as corporate welfare but rather as leveling the playing field. What are your thoughts on affirmative action?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- olliej 5y ago
  To equate compensating for centuries of racist, sexist, etc policies that artificially and deliberately suppressed the success of different races, genders, and other groups to corporate subsidies is unequivocally bullshit. A better comparison if you really insist on comparing treatment of companies to actual people would be to take two identical companies working in the same market. Force one of them to close. After the second has been established for a few hundred years, allow the one you shut down to reopen, but tell them that they can't charge more than 50% of the price of the established firm, and also say that suppliers don't have to provide goods to that firm, and if they do then those suppliers don't have to provide goods at the same level of quality. Those suppliers also charge more, for the lower quality goods. To be safe, you also don't allow the company to build anywhere near existing commercial or industrial zones, so they also have to pay more for shipping and transit, despite being less conveniently placed. After a while you say "ok, you can sell to everyone and we aren't going to limit what you can charge, etc". Then you turn around and say "see everything is equal now". Of course by this point entire industries are built around the version of the product sold by the established firm, the established firm has more resources, the subsidiaries of the established firm have more resources, as do their subsidiaries, because all those subsidiaries have been getting the same preferential treatment. Meanwhile the historically penalized firm has been given a bad rap because the quality of a lower quality of goods, because they got worse materials to start with, they couldn't afford the same quality of workers (in fact they were functionally prohibited from employing the best). Now people say "of course we pay less for goods from that company, they're lower quality". It may be a true statement, but the reason isn't because the company is fundamentally flawed, just that the established company has had unending advantages, and those advantages continue to apply even after the original penalties were removed. Of course this is a gross simplification of what actually happened to the victims of the various repressive laws and policies of various countries, because again, companies are not people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ConcernedSA 5y ago
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions I am a coloured South African(an ethnic group that was previously disadvantaged due to apartheid era racial policies) we in South Africa have Affirmative action policies called Black Economic Empower(BEE) (Its open to all previously advantaged racial groups ie Black, Coloured, Indian they just call it BEE) that has led to mass corruption and cronyism. >Start with crony capitalism, which in South Africa goes by the euphemism “black economic empowerment”. The idea behind it seemed laudable enough—to right a historical wrong. Under apartheid, the country produced white titans of industry such as the Oppenheimer family (owners of DeBeers), while making it hard for black South Africans to own businesses. The ANC(Ruling political party) felt it only fair that there should be black billionaires, too. To give them a leg-up it insisted that mining companies should hand at least 26% of their shares to the “historically disadvantaged”. Mining companies (as well as banks and insurers) did so willingly, diluting existing shareholdings when they transferred stakes to the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, now the president, along with Patrice Motsepe, his brother-in-law, and Bridgette Radebe, his sister-in-law.[1] I and alot of South Africans could stomach a one-off payment or one-off percentage equity stake in firms(in South Africa the government instituted a policy that South African Corporate firms would sell shares preferential)to disadvantaged groups but after these shares were sold, the government wanted to continuously repeat it. >If these handouts had been a one-off tax, their harm would by now have been forgotten. But once the new black shareholders had sold their holdings, the government drafted regulations to repeat the process. And so capital investment in mines fell by 45% between 2010 and 2018, with output falling by 10% and employment by 50,000—a tenth of direct employment in the industry in 2010.[1] When the government gives support not based on merit and competence but gender, race, religion or ethnicity you undermine industrial policy(Instead of support based on a person's potential ability or ability to do things)With affirmative action you end up institutionalising incompetence. >Black Economic Empowerment, a policy that incentivises firms to give equity to black investors or business to black-owned suppliers, has created a new generation of Randlords with more political acumen than entrepreneurial talent. “Cadre deployment”, whereby ANC party(Ruling political party) members get jobs on the basis of factional fealty rather than merit, has degraded the state. These appointees steer contracts towards chosen “tenderpreneurs”, who in turn donate to the party. By 2007 Kgalema Motlanthe, a party grandee, said: “This rot is across the board...Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money.”[2] Many South African feel that our counrty has become "a cappuccino society, A vast, huge, black majority at the bottom with a layer of white cream and a few chocolate sprinklings at the top of it" referring to the small black elite who have gained great riches from the post-apartheid years - from a failed attempt to rebalance the wealth among the many. Yes, I acknowledge the present-day inequities that racist, sexist, etc policies can cause, but if a Government was serious about addressing historical inequalities then you need to invest in education and skills development. Affirmative action never works in the long term, instead of making people competent and self-reliant,it makes them dependent on handouts. Industrial policy can sometimes work in South Korea, Taiwan, Certain Industries in China, or it can fail spectacularly and end up being a waste of time and resources Malaysia and South Africa(instead of giving equity stakes and handouts you could have used those same resources to invest in everyone, not just a particular race, ethnicity, gender or religion.) Affirmative action policies can actually be self-defeating and harm the industrial policies you have. Contrast Taiwan and Malaysia's Industrial Policies and Outcomes Taiwan's has currently a healthy semiconductor industry with many successful and impressive firms ie TSMC, etc. And Malaysia with its affirmative action laws favouring certain ethnicities that ultimately undermined their industrial policies. The corruption and shenanigans that result from affirmative action policies happened in South Africa also happened in Malaysia and undermined their long term industrial goals. Appropriating a quote from Deng Xiaoping "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." This is taken to mean that as long as the economy works, it is a good economy. Affirmative action is equality of outcome. Do people think they have godly powers that can guarantee certain outcomes or results? There is an inherent risk of failure in all ventures and endeavours. A correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity and so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity, but people confuse that with the equal outcome when, equal outcome can only be enforced through violence because different people, free people make different choices and when they make different choices they have different outcomes if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices then you have to use force or violence to get a prefered outcome If people are really serious about freedom and equality then you should want not just the freedom to succeed, but also the freedom to fail. [1]https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/07/24/end-of-the-line-for-anc-economics https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/07/24/end-of-the-line... [2]https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/07/24/where-does-south-africa-go-from-here https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/07/24/...
freeflight 5y ago
As if US companies didn't already have those kinds of subsidies [0]. Whole US states will wave away taxes and offer all kinds of perks just to attract the jobs and business of these corporations. [0] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/intel https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/intel
- georgeburdell 5y ago
  According to that website, Intel has received $6B in government subsidies from 1993/2000, variously, to present. Here are Intel's profits for the past 5 full years: 2020: $20.9B [0] 2019: $21B [0] 2018: $21.1B [1] 2017: $9.6B [1] 2016: $10.3B [2] $6B is a low single digit percentage of their profit going back 28 years. BOE has been subsidized on a whole other level and they're still not consistently profitable. [0] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/intel-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2020-financial https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/... [1] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1092/intel-reports-fourth-quarter-2018-financial-results https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1092/... [2] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1102/intel-reports-record-full-year-revenue-of-59-4-billion https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1102/...
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    The fact that $6 Billion dollars is a fraction of their profit suggests the United States could just regulate that they and other large US semiconductor firms must produce more chips locally. No need to subsidize.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Or just put taxes on foreign dumping/oversubsidized products. Development grants are good things but these huge companies don’t need them, have plenty of resources to build capacity and new products. We should be funding new competition and science not playing subsidizing games with our biggest companies.
  - deleted 5y ago
cma 5y ago
Why do you think ASML can't sell EUV machines to China? It's because before ASML signed on they were started through a US Govt DoE, US Govt DARPA, and US Megacompany consortium: https://www.photonicsonline.com/doc/asml-joins-euv-llc-team-0001 https://www.photonicsonline.com/doc/asml-joins-euv-llc-team-... China probably sees things as leveling the playing field too. To find high tech industry that emerges through pure Ayn Rand search through Mogadishu, various favelas, etc., not developed or rapidly developing places.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  The effect of that is that China will eventually acquire their own ASML.
tooltalk 5y ago
I'm no fan of gov't handouts, but I guess you sometimes need to fight evil with evil. America's semiconductor manufacturing is down to only 13% of global chip production share and declining -- the country's manufacturing industry would get wiped out without the same level of subsidies or protection provided by the Chinese or Taiwanese gov't.
- thevardanian 5y ago
  This is literally not new and has been the case even in the west for centuries. In fact in many ways it contributed to its domination. It's just that the post WW2 era was entirely an anomaly, and one that we got too comfortable with.
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  >evil it used to be common sense not to hand over your nation's strategic assets to potential foreign adversaries, common Americans all intuitively knew shipping manufacturing to China was bad. Wall Street greed and bribed politicians allowed this to happen. Evil is selling out your nation for profit
  - niij 5y ago
    There's a stark difference between selling out and refusing to use public funds to subsidize large corporations.
    - barkingcat 5y ago
      There is also the thing that American corps like to do: sell out and buy out the politicians so they can use public funds to campaign against subsidies, education, and all possible methods to regain the capabilities that they sold out to begin with. It's like American capitalism wants itself to fail. It's pretty much self sabotage at this point.
      - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
        The tendency to destroy itself is both the good and the bad part of capitalism. Karl Marx was pretty sober about this. He always argued capitalism is a necessary stage but externalities would bottom out and the system would inevitably destroy itself.
eunos 5y ago
What does it mean by subsidy in this context? Tax breaks?
- davidjytang 5y ago
  I worked in another field against Chinese state-owned competitions. Pretty much for each unit they sell, they not only receive payment from customer, they also receive government payment for the same amount. As a result, they were able to keep the price unreasonably low.
  - AYBABTME 5y ago
    How's the CCP financing the subsidies? AFAIK they don't collect taxes on the average citizen/there's rampant tax avoidance.
    - eunos 5y ago
      SOE profits are used as slush fund.
      - AYBABTME 5y ago
        What's that?
        mikehotel 5y ago
        State Owned Enterprises - See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_C...
    - csomar 5y ago
      Their currency doesn't float on the market. Strict capital controls are a hidden tax on exports. Imports are then tariff-ed to balance their sheet. It's an alternative taxation method if you cannot establish a compliant citizenry around your tax system.
    - 5y ago
vmception 5y ago
This is why you finesse as many governments as possible while the people tear themselves up over their government’s budget overruns
jwmhjwmh 5y ago
Another win for state economic planning.
- tooltalk 5y ago
  or more appropriately, it's a win for corporatism led by a multinational company called Apple.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I’m sorry, but Apple is very much an American company. They only use suppliers in China because capitalism forced them to, otherwise they’d be unable to provide the goods at prices their users would be willing to pay.
    - tooltalk 5y ago
      in light of the recent disclosure that Tim Apple committed $270B worth of goodies for China to win some favors from uncle Xi, nobody is buying this rather lame execuse anymore.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        What alternative do they have? To let their competitors beat them? Would the US be better off then?
        tooltalk 5y ago
        Ask Google, Facebook, or better yet Samsung. Apple has no direct competition in the premium phone segment and consequently takes 70% of the entire industry's profit share, despite only 15% in global unit sales. Not everyone thinks Apple's profit should come before America's national or economic interest.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
Agreed. Our society’s seeming cultural inability to mobilise against a proven and motivated ideological adversary may be its death knell. “But meh” might be the answer to how empires dissolve.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  The key is they have learnt from Soviet Union, (and money side) Japan and Eu. Also got thousands of years saying one thing and do another, controlling people mouth etc. Want a demo how to kill people with a thousand cut (but he must not die otherwise the cutter would be in big trouble). Great experience to die under one. Dying now in Hong Kong.
  - addicted 5y ago
    And the US has outlasted the USSR and Japan. Both threats disappeared as threats. And the EU, while extremely successful, does not subsidize their industries (the exception being the airline and airplane manufacturing industries and defense which the US also does). So whatever lessons China has learnt from the USSR and Japan don’t appear to have a strong track record of success.
- pokepim 5y ago
  Wait, what does it mean? Are you calling for a war over Apple changing its OLED supplier? Huhh some far right racists are going way too far with their imaginations.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    A more interesting idea is what happens if China wins?
scoopertrooper 5y ago
I don't know. If the Chinese government wants to subsidise my OLED screen, I say let them.
- azinman2 5y ago
  And in doing so, they put everyone else out of business and then own the market.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Isn’t unregulated capitalism prone to natural monopolies?
  - MikusR 5y ago
    You know what the company that owns this domain does?
- dotancohen 5y ago
  That's extraordinarily short-sighted. When your nation no longer has manufacturing capability and you are beholden to Chinese OLED screens you might think differently. Not only will the price be fit for a monopoly, but also they could freely restrict tech from your other industries, further crippling your nation. Not to mention restricting sales to military and other strategic ventures. Several decades ago it was food security - the idea that a nation must produce enough of its own food to feed its populace - that was the concern of import policy. Today the field is much, much broader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    My nation already has zero OLED screen manufacturing capacity, the world seems to keep spinning. China will dump out their OLEDs, I’ll get cheaper OLEDs, my nation will make other things and exchange them for OLEDs. China may come to dominate the OLED market, but OLEDs will be displaced by micro-LEDs. China will never completely control any particular technology simply because, wealthy as they are, they don’t have the resources to afford such a thing. They may be able to buy their way to market dominance, but there will always be alternative sources. Not least, because of the fact they’re not the only country pursuing a strategy of national champions. Food security is also a bit of a joke. Well not a joke, a cudgel used by the farming lobby to shut down reasoned discussions about whether we should reduce some of the largesses currently extended to farmers. Nations don’t need ‘food security’, they need a functioning global supply chain and reasonable leaders that can restrain the dogs of war. Notions of things like food security only make wars more likely because nations feel like they’d be more likely to win in the event of one occurring. But really, we all know nobody would win in a war where America got to the point where food security was in question.
coolgoose 5y ago
I am not against leveling the playing field, but those subsidies are peanuts in the semi-conductor world.

markdown 5y ago

> This is why legislation such as the CHIPS Act should not be seen as corporate welfare but rather as leveling the playing field. What are your thoughts on affirmative action?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
olliej 5y ago
To equate compensating for centuries of racist, sexist, etc policies that artificially and deliberately suppressed the success of different races, genders, and other groups to corporate subsidies is unequivocally bullshit. A better comparison if you really insist on comparing treatment of companies to actual people would be to take two identical companies working in the same market. Force one of them to close. After the second has been established for a few hundred years, allow the one you shut down to reopen, but tell them that they can't charge more than 50% of the price of the established firm, and also say that suppliers don't have to provide goods to that firm, and if they do then those suppliers don't have to provide goods at the same level of quality. Those suppliers also charge more, for the lower quality goods. To be safe, you also don't allow the company to build anywhere near existing commercial or industrial zones, so they also have to pay more for shipping and transit, despite being less conveniently placed. After a while you say "ok, you can sell to everyone and we aren't going to limit what you can charge, etc". Then you turn around and say "see everything is equal now". Of course by this point entire industries are built around the version of the product sold by the established firm, the established firm has more resources, the subsidiaries of the established firm have more resources, as do their subsidiaries, because all those subsidiaries have been getting the same preferential treatment. Meanwhile the historically penalized firm has been given a bad rap because the quality of a lower quality of goods, because they got worse materials to start with, they couldn't afford the same quality of workers (in fact they were functionally prohibited from employing the best). Now people say "of course we pay less for goods from that company, they're lower quality". It may be a true statement, but the reason isn't because the company is fundamentally flawed, just that the established company has had unending advantages, and those advantages continue to apply even after the original penalties were removed. Of course this is a gross simplification of what actually happened to the victims of the various repressive laws and policies of various countries, because again, companies are not people.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ConcernedSA 5y ago
The road to hell is paved with good intentions I am a coloured South African(an ethnic group that was previously disadvantaged due to apartheid era racial policies) we in South Africa have Affirmative action policies called Black Economic Empower(BEE) (Its open to all previously advantaged racial groups ie Black, Coloured, Indian they just call it BEE) that has led to mass corruption and cronyism. >Start with crony capitalism, which in South Africa goes by the euphemism “black economic empowerment”. The idea behind it seemed laudable enough—to right a historical wrong. Under apartheid, the country produced white titans of industry such as the Oppenheimer family (owners of DeBeers), while making it hard for black South Africans to own businesses. The ANC(Ruling political party) felt it only fair that there should be black billionaires, too. To give them a leg-up it insisted that mining companies should hand at least 26% of their shares to the “historically disadvantaged”. Mining companies (as well as banks and insurers) did so willingly, diluting existing shareholdings when they transferred stakes to the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, now the president, along with Patrice Motsepe, his brother-in-law, and Bridgette Radebe, his sister-in-law.[1] I and alot of South Africans could stomach a one-off payment or one-off percentage equity stake in firms(in South Africa the government instituted a policy that South African Corporate firms would sell shares preferential)to disadvantaged groups but after these shares were sold, the government wanted to continuously repeat it. >If these handouts had been a one-off tax, their harm would by now have been forgotten. But once the new black shareholders had sold their holdings, the government drafted regulations to repeat the process. And so capital investment in mines fell by 45% between 2010 and 2018, with output falling by 10% and employment by 50,000—a tenth of direct employment in the industry in 2010.[1] When the government gives support not based on merit and competence but gender, race, religion or ethnicity you undermine industrial policy(Instead of support based on a person's potential ability or ability to do things)With affirmative action you end up institutionalising incompetence. >Black Economic Empowerment, a policy that incentivises firms to give equity to black investors or business to black-owned suppliers, has created a new generation of Randlords with more political acumen than entrepreneurial talent. “Cadre deployment”, whereby ANC party(Ruling political party) members get jobs on the basis of factional fealty rather than merit, has degraded the state. These appointees steer contracts towards chosen “tenderpreneurs”, who in turn donate to the party. By 2007 Kgalema Motlanthe, a party grandee, said: “This rot is across the board...Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money.”[2] Many South African feel that our counrty has become "a cappuccino society, A vast, huge, black majority at the bottom with a layer of white cream and a few chocolate sprinklings at the top of it" referring to the small black elite who have gained great riches from the post-apartheid years - from a failed attempt to rebalance the wealth among the many. Yes, I acknowledge the present-day inequities that racist, sexist, etc policies can cause, but if a Government was serious about addressing historical inequalities then you need to invest in education and skills development. Affirmative action never works in the long term, instead of making people competent and self-reliant,it makes them dependent on handouts. Industrial policy can sometimes work in South Korea, Taiwan, Certain Industries in China, or it can fail spectacularly and end up being a waste of time and resources Malaysia and South Africa(instead of giving equity stakes and handouts you could have used those same resources to invest in everyone, not just a particular race, ethnicity, gender or religion.) Affirmative action policies can actually be self-defeating and harm the industrial policies you have. Contrast Taiwan and Malaysia's Industrial Policies and Outcomes Taiwan's has currently a healthy semiconductor industry with many successful and impressive firms ie TSMC, etc. And Malaysia with its affirmative action laws favouring certain ethnicities that ultimately undermined their industrial policies. The corruption and shenanigans that result from affirmative action policies happened in South Africa also happened in Malaysia and undermined their long term industrial goals. Appropriating a quote from Deng Xiaoping "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." This is taken to mean that as long as the economy works, it is a good economy. Affirmative action is equality of outcome. Do people think they have godly powers that can guarantee certain outcomes or results? There is an inherent risk of failure in all ventures and endeavours. A correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity and so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity, but people confuse that with the equal outcome when, equal outcome can only be enforced through violence because different people, free people make different choices and when they make different choices they have different outcomes if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices then you have to use force or violence to get a prefered outcome If people are really serious about freedom and equality then you should want not just the freedom to succeed, but also the freedom to fail. [1]https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/07/24/end-of-the-line-for-anc-economics https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/07/24/end-of-the-line... [2]https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/07/24/where-does-south-africa-go-from-here https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/07/24/...

freeflight 5y ago

As if US companies didn't already have those kinds of subsidies [0]. Whole US states will wave away taxes and offer all kinds of perks just to attract the jobs and business of these corporations. [0] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/intel https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/intel

georgeburdell 5y ago
According to that website, Intel has received $6B in government subsidies from 1993/2000, variously, to present. Here are Intel's profits for the past 5 full years: 2020: $20.9B [0] 2019: $21B [0] 2018: $21.1B [1] 2017: $9.6B [1] 2016: $10.3B [2] $6B is a low single digit percentage of their profit going back 28 years. BOE has been subsidized on a whole other level and they're still not consistently profitable. [0] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/intel-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2020-financial https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/... [1] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1092/intel-reports-fourth-quarter-2018-financial-results https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1092/... [2] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1102/intel-reports-record-full-year-revenue-of-59-4-billion https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1102/...
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  The fact that $6 Billion dollars is a fraction of their profit suggests the United States could just regulate that they and other large US semiconductor firms must produce more chips locally. No need to subsidize.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Or just put taxes on foreign dumping/oversubsidized products. Development grants are good things but these huge companies don’t need them, have plenty of resources to build capacity and new products. We should be funding new competition and science not playing subsidizing games with our biggest companies.
- deleted 5y ago

cma 5y ago

Why do you think ASML can't sell EUV machines to China? It's because before ASML signed on they were started through a US Govt DoE, US Govt DARPA, and US Megacompany consortium: https://www.photonicsonline.com/doc/asml-joins-euv-llc-team-0001 https://www.photonicsonline.com/doc/asml-joins-euv-llc-team-... China probably sees things as leveling the playing field too. To find high tech industry that emerges through pure Ayn Rand search through Mogadishu, various favelas, etc., not developed or rapidly developing places.

rbanffy 5y ago
The effect of that is that China will eventually acquire their own ASML.

tooltalk 5y ago

I'm no fan of gov't handouts, but I guess you sometimes need to fight evil with evil. America's semiconductor manufacturing is down to only 13% of global chip production share and declining -- the country's manufacturing industry would get wiped out without the same level of subsidies or protection provided by the Chinese or Taiwanese gov't.

thevardanian 5y ago
This is literally not new and has been the case even in the west for centuries. In fact in many ways it contributed to its domination. It's just that the post WW2 era was entirely an anomaly, and one that we got too comfortable with.
ren_engineer 5y ago
>evil it used to be common sense not to hand over your nation's strategic assets to potential foreign adversaries, common Americans all intuitively knew shipping manufacturing to China was bad. Wall Street greed and bribed politicians allowed this to happen. Evil is selling out your nation for profit
- niij 5y ago
  There's a stark difference between selling out and refusing to use public funds to subsidize large corporations.
  - barkingcat 5y ago
    There is also the thing that American corps like to do: sell out and buy out the politicians so they can use public funds to campaign against subsidies, education, and all possible methods to regain the capabilities that they sold out to begin with. It's like American capitalism wants itself to fail. It's pretty much self sabotage at this point.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      The tendency to destroy itself is both the good and the bad part of capitalism. Karl Marx was pretty sober about this. He always argued capitalism is a necessary stage but externalities would bottom out and the system would inevitably destroy itself.

eunos 5y ago

What does it mean by subsidy in this context? Tax breaks?

davidjytang 5y ago
I worked in another field against Chinese state-owned competitions. Pretty much for each unit they sell, they not only receive payment from customer, they also receive government payment for the same amount. As a result, they were able to keep the price unreasonably low.
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  How's the CCP financing the subsidies? AFAIK they don't collect taxes on the average citizen/there's rampant tax avoidance.
  - eunos 5y ago
    SOE profits are used as slush fund.
    - AYBABTME 5y ago
      What's that?
      - mikehotel 5y ago
        State Owned Enterprises - See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_C...
  - csomar 5y ago
    Their currency doesn't float on the market. Strict capital controls are a hidden tax on exports. Imports are then tariff-ed to balance their sheet. It's an alternative taxation method if you cannot establish a compliant citizenry around your tax system.
  - 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

This is why you finesse as many governments as possible while the people tear themselves up over their government’s budget overruns

jwmhjwmh 5y ago

Another win for state economic planning.

tooltalk 5y ago
or more appropriately, it's a win for corporatism led by a multinational company called Apple.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I’m sorry, but Apple is very much an American company. They only use suppliers in China because capitalism forced them to, otherwise they’d be unable to provide the goods at prices their users would be willing to pay.
  - tooltalk 5y ago
    in light of the recent disclosure that Tim Apple committed $270B worth of goodies for China to win some favors from uncle Xi, nobody is buying this rather lame execuse anymore.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      What alternative do they have? To let their competitors beat them? Would the US be better off then?
      - tooltalk 5y ago
        Ask Google, Facebook, or better yet Samsung. Apple has no direct competition in the premium phone segment and consequently takes 70% of the entire industry's profit share, despite only 15% in global unit sales. Not everyone thinks Apple's profit should come before America's national or economic interest.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

Agreed. Our society’s seeming cultural inability to mobilise against a proven and motivated ideological adversary may be its death knell. “But meh” might be the answer to how empires dissolve.

ngcc_hk 5y ago
The key is they have learnt from Soviet Union, (and money side) Japan and Eu. Also got thousands of years saying one thing and do another, controlling people mouth etc. Want a demo how to kill people with a thousand cut (but he must not die otherwise the cutter would be in big trouble). Great experience to die under one. Dying now in Hong Kong.
- addicted 5y ago
  And the US has outlasted the USSR and Japan. Both threats disappeared as threats. And the EU, while extremely successful, does not subsidize their industries (the exception being the airline and airplane manufacturing industries and defense which the US also does). So whatever lessons China has learnt from the USSR and Japan don’t appear to have a strong track record of success.
pokepim 5y ago
Wait, what does it mean? Are you calling for a war over Apple changing its OLED supplier? Huhh some far right racists are going way too far with their imaginations.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  A more interesting idea is what happens if China wins?

scoopertrooper 5y ago

I don't know. If the Chinese government wants to subsidise my OLED screen, I say let them.

azinman2 5y ago
And in doing so, they put everyone else out of business and then own the market.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Isn’t unregulated capitalism prone to natural monopolies?
- MikusR 5y ago
  You know what the company that owns this domain does?
dotancohen 5y ago
That's extraordinarily short-sighted. When your nation no longer has manufacturing capability and you are beholden to Chinese OLED screens you might think differently. Not only will the price be fit for a monopoly, but also they could freely restrict tech from your other industries, further crippling your nation. Not to mention restricting sales to military and other strategic ventures. Several decades ago it was food security - the idea that a nation must produce enough of its own food to feed its populace - that was the concern of import policy. Today the field is much, much broader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  My nation already has zero OLED screen manufacturing capacity, the world seems to keep spinning. China will dump out their OLEDs, I’ll get cheaper OLEDs, my nation will make other things and exchange them for OLEDs. China may come to dominate the OLED market, but OLEDs will be displaced by micro-LEDs. China will never completely control any particular technology simply because, wealthy as they are, they don’t have the resources to afford such a thing. They may be able to buy their way to market dominance, but there will always be alternative sources. Not least, because of the fact they’re not the only country pursuing a strategy of national champions. Food security is also a bit of a joke. Well not a joke, a cudgel used by the farming lobby to shut down reasoned discussions about whether we should reduce some of the largesses currently extended to farmers. Nations don’t need ‘food security’, they need a functioning global supply chain and reasonable leaders that can restrain the dogs of war. Notions of things like food security only make wars more likely because nations feel like they’d be more likely to win in the event of one occurring. But really, we all know nobody would win in a war where America got to the point where food security was in question.

coolgoose 5y ago

I am not against leveling the playing field, but those subsidies are peanuts in the semi-conductor world.