A key point I always try to convey to policymakers and business folks in the west is that China's competitiveness in manufacturing is underpinned by unrivaled scale and ecosystem. The stereotype far too often is that it's all about subsidies and cheap labor, which...
https://twitter.com/kyleichan/status/1969956985526169657
...causes people to drastically underestimate the challenge of building alternative supply chains and the scale of the resources required to do it.
Or well, a lot of powerful people seem to be so out of touch with the physical production of things that they vastly *overestimate* the challenge in some areas (rare earths) and vastly underestimate it in others (solar and batteries).
The rhetoric about China's dominance of a few strategic industries also overlooks that for many essential clean technologies - wind turbines, electrolyzers, heat pumps, even EVs, there are manufacturers that are at par with or ahead of Chinese suppliers (for now).
Does China use subsidies and trade barriers? Yes. But they've used them strategically over decades to build an awe-inspiring industrial juggernaut that would currently be extremely hard to compete with on a fully leveled playing field.
I think that 1) China's drive to vastly increase the supply and drive down the price of clean energy technology is making a huge positive contribution and 2) maintaining and, when needed, building diversified supply of key strategic clean energy technologies is important.
China itself has insisted on almost fully self-controlled supply chains and therefore has no grounds to object if others want at least to diversify.
It's just important to be clear-eyed about the challenge, and also not to pretend you can skirt it by sticking to 20th century technology forever.
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