[solid_fuel]

What is the implication here? Are you warning that US corporations might start doing something shady, like scraping the internet at large scale for training data? Or mass-dowloading pirated copies of books, completely ignoring copyright?

I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.

[chaostheory]

No, he means that the US will close most of its domestic market to competition just like China has for decades, and the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere

[crote]

> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere

Isn't that exactly what companies like Uber have already been doing? Take VC money, sell goods & services at a huge loss, wait until the competition goes bankrupt.

[rednb]

Exactly, it's funny how most Americans have no self-awareness on this topic.

And beyond VCs, which are like massive subsidies funded by printed dollars to which no other country has access, even in industries like electric vehicles, Chinese total direct subsidies to their EV companies are like $5bn per year, while the the ones provided by the US to their auto manufacturers are in the range of $50bn per year.

I don't think the US are cheaters or are doing something bad. But i do think that this propaganda about China flooding the market through "overcapacity" and subsidies is very dishonest and needs to stop.

[chaostheory]

The CCP's recent yearly subsidies for China's EV industry ranges from $30 billion - $46 billion per year compared to $10 billion - $20 billion per year for the US. A conservative estimate of total subsidies lands China at about $230 billion while the US was at $70 billion.

[deaux]

Yes. Dumping abroad is the entire model that Silicon Valley has been built on in the last 2 decades. China just copied the model. And even then it's a light version of it.

[deaux]

You know, normally when I read these Reddit comments saying "you made me snort on the bus", I always took them as exaggeration.

Turns out I was wrong, I just hadn't read something funny enough yet.

> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere

This deserves to win HN comment of the year 2026.

The majority of the NASDAQ market cap is a direct result of the US subsidizing and dumping its goods on the rest of the world en masse.

[janalsncm]

Just a data point, but the US currently imposes a 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles.

[chaostheory]

What’s worse, tariffs or outright banning the competition from your market? China has done both despite globalism being what has lifted it from poverty. Why is everyone suddenly surprised that globalism and free markets are coming to an end? Is this a net good? Mostly no unless you count more redundant supply chains.

[tw1984]

> China has done both despite globalism being what has lifted it from poverty.

such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading.

globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty, it was designed to extract excessive values from those poor countries in the first place. painting globalism as something noble is naive at best.

globalism was the theme of world trading for the past several decades, it was available to all nations. care to explain why other nations in poverty failed to be lifted by the exact same fancy globalism?

let me help you on this one - China was THE leading technological and economical force of the vast majority part of human civilisation. What happened between 1840 and 2010 (the China in poverty period) was an outlier of the history. Globalism didn't lift China from that poverty, the ability to lead the human civilization which was embedded into the Chinese DNA did that.

Kid, when our Chinese ancestors wrote the Art of War, your ancestors were still swinging on trees. You just missed that big picture.

[chaostheory]

> such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading.

Yes, so the kettle is calling out the pot?

> globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty

It doesn’t matter what it was designed for. What matters is what it does in reality and there is no doubt that globalism helped lift China from Mao’s disastrous policies. That’s not mutually exclusive from China’s past as the Middle Kingdom

[janalsncm]

To steel man the person you are replying to, what reduced poverty in China was money from globalism + significant domestic reinvestment of that money into poverty reduction. That reinvestment policy was a deliberate choice, and now China has the biggest middle class in the world.

An example of a country which didn’t do that is Nigeria. They got something like $300B in oil revenue over a 30 year period but have actually seen significant increases in poverty, now at 70%.

[vintermann]

The "stolen IP" argument can always be made as an excuse. I'm surprised how well it works with some people.

[overfeed]

The surviving non-American farmers would be confused by the future-speculative tense as America has already been doing this for decades in agriculture, and have been complaining for decades about both the subsidies and dumping of American corn.

[chaostheory]

Sure, but not at China’s scale and no where close to number of industries where China does it. Why? The US was a net importer in order to support the dollar being the global reserve.

[8note]

as in, the main trade complaint that trump has with nafta. the Uzs wants to dump subsidized dairy on canadian markets, and canada doesnt want it.

same with US corn on Mexico and other central american countries, creating all those migrant problems in north america.

wooo, americans subsidizing and dumping poor quality goods

[DiogenesKynikos]

Most of the Chinese domestic market is open to foreign competition. The areas that are closed off are those that are politically sensitive: publishing (including social media) and banking.

As for dumping, Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping. Chinese tokens cost more abroad. Chinese cars cost several times more in Western markets than in China.

[crote]

"Dumping" is when Chinese companies beat Western ones on the free market. If all claims of Chinese government subsidies on basic products were true, China would've gone bankrupt multiple times already.

You're being beaten by a Chinese company? Why improve your own process when you can just lobby for sanctions and tariffs instead!

[noncoml]

The US spent decades transferring manufacturing, capital, and know-how to China, while Chinese students trained, and excelled, at elite Western universities. Why are people surprised that China eventually became capable of competing with the US?

[testaburger]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/07/hostile-powers... these students?

Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service.

David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics.

“The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

[DiogenesKynikos]

People like Mr. Vigneault know nothing about how academia works. If they get their way, they'll do massive damage to Canada's academic research ecosystem. Academia is naturally open and international.

These people don't get that academics publish their research in openly available journals. They go to conferences around the world and tell everyone who will listen exactly what they are working on. Unless you're working in a secretive government weapons lab, there's nothing to hide.

In the US, people like Mr. Vigneault instituted a witch hunt against ethnically Chinese researchers, and ended up messing with the lives of all sorts of innocent people, including the director of MIT's mechanical engineering department. They found zero spies. Just a bunch of scientists working normally.

[AuthAuth]

Most of the time its just low labour costs and no environmental reg. Its really that simple

[DiogenesKynikos]

That does not explain DeepSeek, nor does it explain the car industry.

The main advantages the Chinese car industry has right now are: they lead in battery R&D, production is highly automated, they iterate quickly, Chinese work culture is extremely competitive and things get done fast, and the Chinese state has policies to promote EV adoption, so there's a huge domestic market.

Note that the last point is different from subsidies to car manufacturers. Cities made it difficult to get license plates for ICE cars. The government encouraged the massive buildout of charging infrastructure. And it used consumer rebates, like California did.

[subsistence234]

aside from the huge domestic market (or potential in the future), china has built incredibly efficient infrastructure for manufacturing prototyping/production.

but it's also thanks to protectionism, and their strictly controlled (not freely traded) cheap currency.

if china had to play by the same rules as japan or germany it would not be quite as successful. but the west walked into this trap, hoping their win-win proposal would be satisfactory for all. now the west is too dependent on chinese production to enforce equal standing.

of course the US has its own unfair advantages, e.g. the global reserve currency and the massive post-WWII headstart.

[LinXitoW]

At least in the case of solar and EVs, it's a case of western countries preferring to protect their existing cashcow industries rather than invest to build the industries of the future.

For a brief second, Germany was in a position to become a solar power global player. But our conservative government was more interested in protecting their local, bad industry. Including destroying forests for coal all projections said we would never actually need.

[gf000]

From a EU perspective similar could be said about the US market - no strict worker protections, lobbying, and a general "capital first" mindset over the users/people (see GDPR etc).

[fn-mote]

> Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping

Dumping is selling goods below cost.

Usually because government is subsidizing part of the production. I don’t believe the word “dumping” is used for the similar process when Venture Capital is subsidizing it, but using the same term would make sense.

Price at home vs abroad does not matter.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Price at home vs. abroad is key. The term dumping comes from the idea that a company that sells profitably in its home market dumps excess production abroad at below cost.

This is not what is happening here. Chinese manufacturers are making a large profit off every car they sell in Western markets. As I said above, they're selling these cars at several times the price they charge in China. Unless you believe these cars are being sold at just 30% of cost in China, there's no way Chinese companies are selling below cost in the West.

[slaw]

> Dumping is selling goods below cost.

Chinese cars are not sold below cost in Western markets. So it is not dumping.

[deaux]

> I don’t believe the word “dumping” is used for the similar process when Venture Capital is subsidizing it,

I've been doing so for years. How about you join me today. I already see two other users doing the same, so there'll be at least 4 of us.

It's blatantly dumping, whether the source of the money is directly the government (those in power) or VC (mostly US billionaires (trillionaires?), in other words, those in power) is a trivial implementation detail.

[echelon]

> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere

The US is a net importer, not exporter. It needs to absorb trade at a deficit to encourage the use of the US dollar as the reserve currency.

We import goods, we settle in surplus dollars. The world runs on those dollars.

If the US starts dumping on various industries (how is it even primed to do this?), then the world reserve currency status comes into question.

[watwut]

Whole Silicon Valley is based on selling products under price, for years, killing the competition or making it impossible and extracting once monopoly position is stable enough. It is the same play book again and again and again and again. It runs unprofitable companies for absurd lengths of time.

[digitaltrees]

Or building backdoor in to the physical servers sold around the world?