America's uncompetitiveness in certain industries isn't because of strong environmental and labor regulations. It's scale. That's why, despite working 996, Chin

America's uncompetitiveness in certain industries isn't because of strong environmental and labor regulations. It's scale. That's why, despite working 996, Chinese software technology companies are still in (admittedly) second place compared to the US. Places like Silicon Valley, etc. have such a dense concentration of talent that if you want to build anything at the cutting edge, you need to pack up, leave your life behind and move over there. Likewise, this is why China dominates in hardware. You can walk into a random store in Shenzhen and pick out enough off-the-shelf parts to build a reasonably high-end smartphone. No one in the US or Europe will even talk to you if you're not ordering 10k MOQ. And that's if you can find a supplier. Scale is also the reason why China and South Korea build nuclear reactors at a fraction of Western prices. On budget too! Not because they carelessly expose everyone to toxic radiation. That's why China has 200* America's shipbuilding capacity. They build so much of it that they unlock economies of scale. It's the reason why China is churning out more PV systems and batteries than the rest of the world combined. They're building so much that their per unit costs fall tremendously. Then they parley those gains in one industry into adjacent industries like EVs where batteries are 40% of the cost. When you stack economies of scale back-to-back, you end up with an order of magnitude's difference. That's why high-end Chinese EVs cost, say <$20k, while American manufacturers are struggling.