New York Times: How China Pulled So Far Ahead On Industrial Policy

In my speech at The Political Cesspool: 20 Year Anniversary Conference, I name dropped Pat Buchanan’s 1998 book The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed To The Gods of the Global Economy as a key influence on my political views. I brought up Joe Biden’s recent 100% tariff rate on Chinese electric vehicles as an example of how much the mainstream consensus has changed on trade and industrial policy. I also cited a bunch of poll numbers from American Compass which showed broad support on the Right for a pro-worker economic policy.

New York Times:

“But no country has come close to matching the scale and tenacity of China’s support. The proof is in the production: In 2022, Beijing accounted for 85 percent of all clean-energy manufacturing investment in the world, according to the International Energy Agency.

Now the United States, Europe and other wealthy nations are trying frantically to catch up. Hoping to correct past missteps on industrial policy and learn from China’s successes, they are spending huge amounts on subsidizing homegrown companies while also seeking to block competing Chinese products. They have made modest inroads: Last year, the energy agency said, China’s share of new clean-energy factory investment fell to 75 percent.

The problem for the West, though, is that China’s industrial dominance is underpinned by decades of experience using the power of a one-party state to pull all the levers of government and banking, while encouraging frenetic competition among private companies.

China’s unrivaled production of solar panels and electric vehicles is built on an earlier cultivation of the chemical, steel, battery and electronics industries, as well as large investments in rail lines, ports and highways.

From 2017 to 2019, it spent an extraordinary 1.7 percent of its gross domestic product on industrial support, more than twice the percentage of any other country, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. …

President Biden and European leaders are determined to develop their countries’ manufacturing capacity in advanced technologies like semiconductors, electric vehicles and batteries, in part by adopting some of China’s tactics to nurture industries.”

Here we are 24 years later.

The New York Times is publishing incredulous articles asking how this happened to us. How did China become the largest economy in the world? How did China come to dominate global manufacturing? Why is China so far ahead of us in renewable technologies and electric vehicles? How did we end up with a national debt of 32 trillion dollars which increases by a trillion every three months?