Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Because they have access to lots of cheap labour they can treat poorly, don't need environmental assessments, government approvals etc. I don't want to live in a country that functions like that, which means I'll accept that we have to pay more for things we make here.
It's not magic, these are tradeoffs. Magic would be doing it without tradeoffs, which everyone seem to think is how it happens.
Do they also have rapidly improving knowledge based workers? Yes, because they have the resources to funnel money into it. Resources we gave them by offshoring production to the cheapest places possible, and now they are using them to beat us at all of our own games, because they don't play by the same rules, and will steal IP from anyone they need to to win. I mean, it's almost like a lesson should have been learned by us on this one, but apparently not, 'cause y'all keep finding ways to justify continuing it.
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Again, I'm not condoning human Rights abuses, IP theft, or even their political structure. You're being far, far too binary here. It's not like there's only two ways to do this, our current one or theirs. And as for cheap labor, Chinese wages are rising as well and are not as cheap as they once were. The cost advantages are actually mostly due to a) financing costs (subsidized), efficient production (a skill/culture issue), b) land costs (subsidized), and extreme competition. Many of these factories are almost entirely automated. There are hundreds of Chinese EV startups and only the strongest survive.
Our car companies are going to collapse because they don't only sell in North America and Europe. Us paying more for our auto company cars will not help because being in our market alone will cause a massive drop in sales for all of them. On top of that, less cars are sold in Canada and the US every year. They're exposed to Chinese competition globally and we can either say screw it and get out of the car market or we can use tools like the IRA in the States to boost cleantech. Giving up that ginormous industry to China would be a giant mistake. No energy in history is growing like solar and batteries, and EVs are a quickly growing monster sized market. For instance, more money is being spent on solar alone than in the entire oil industry and that gap is growing at crazy speeds. Nevermind batteries, electrolyzers, etc.
Simply saying "they're not playing fair so we'll just buy our own" solves nothing and makes our position much worse.