To make modern cars you need advanced industrial equipment and machines, robots. Where does China manage to get them? Did West sell these strategic resources to a competitor to get little short-term profit? Or did they learn how to make them themselves?
Foreign companies sold them, thinking PRC couldn't make them. Made a killing for 20 years. Then tale as old as time. PRC started making them, now adding more industrial robots than nearly everyone else combined last few years.
Recently, to compete with PRC competitors entering market. Growing up in 90s, they were price gouging hardcore. Was family friends with someone high up in ABB China executive. They were printing money for a while.
I love the low-key racism on these comments. "How would those stupid peoples learn to make nice things?"
It's not much of a surprise. China could offer cheap unskilled labor initially, basic factories are set up there. They could use this to grow their skilled, educated workforce, and gradually increase the complexity and capabilities of their industries.
I know that people like you would love if poor countries were kept as just manual labor resource extraction, but turns out economies don't really work like that. There are incentives and competition all aroud, among companies, among countries, etc and so forth.
Manufacturing, especially for complex products, can be a supply chain nightmare. Any edge your competitors have against you may spell your doom. You cut costs where you can. You get suppliers where they are cheaper, you move factories to where they are cheaper, all this while trying to satisfy your customers.
I find it particularly funny nowadays that a lot of people from the US have a hard on for tariffs, as if this is going to save them from anything. Tariffs are interesting that they are typically reciprocal. You apply tarrifs on some of my important industries, I do the same against you, and then I go do business with your competitors.
