Man, every time where there's a Chinese product category you realistically can't compete with - it's always some excuse of - because Chinese state is subsidizing it and supporting it.
All it does is simply makes the Chinese government sound good and competent.
Oh, nice, a government that does good things that lead to good outcomes! How unusual, how unexpected! That's basically cheating!
We can't realistically have our government be useful and competent and serve our interests, so there's no way we can compete!
It's an interesting comparison. In China they prop up businesses with cheap loans and help from local governments, in the US it's the VCs. So when Uber was subsidized then everything was ok, but when China state propped up EVs then suddenly it's not ok. These subsidies in the majority of cases are over btw, because competition was too big in China between carmakers, cars in China are ridiculously cheap. Because that's their strategy, you fund a lot of players, like there were 100+ EV makers in China, then you let the market do its job, they optimize or they die, some will die and the best will prevail. Margins are so low in China that they are looking at outside markets where legacy carmakers need to drop the margins and scale up or they will have no chance in competing. And for the argument that they do it to kill the industry so then they can make cars for more price, the most obvious counterargument is why they didn't do it for everything else that they dominate already? Why are solar panels going down? They dominate the world in solar panels, there is basically no competition and prices are still going down, same with batteries.
Capitalism and free markets failed to deliver, lots of cope around that mental model. If it was superior, it would’ve succeeded. China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity, and it shows. Play to win.