alt Hacker NewsAs European faced with similar pain points, I would assert it was having those MBAs offshoring everything with a colonial attittude, as if the nations on the received end would only take orders from their masters and not learn to master the technology themselves.
After a while, naturally the locals would buy the white label products that are anyway the same as the branded ones, many times produced on the same factory lines.
My father used to say, every company goes downhill when management takes over, meaning those straight out management schools without any actual business experience on what the company does, and he was kind of right, that is how we hand landed in late stage capitalism and entshitification, in the middle of geopolitics turn over.
These robots might not drive the car for us, but certainly will become part of some police containment unit, regardless if they are remote controlled or AI driven.
Problem is that China had both cost advantage (both human capital and energy) and a large internal market. If as a company you decided not to invest and build a factory in China, you were quickly losing vs your competitor. The solution to this problem for EU and US however won't be as simple..
Once China built an industrial base, and has cheap energy sources, you cannot directly out compete it. You can only try to maintain your own industrial base by locking competitors out of your market. There is no other way. In the end that's the result of globalization - US&EU companies thought they can produce cheap, sell expensive. Instead they trained their own competition, and due to weak IP laws enabled this exodus of industry know-how to China.
Now, if China was a smaller country - let's say Japan or Turkey - this wouldn't be such a huge problem. But for the global economy, having a single country that produces 80% of all consumer goods is also a huge problem. That was never the case before with the US (except maybe directly after WW2). US+Europe, Japan+Korea, Canada, Australia supply chain was much more diverse and distributed.
What happens now is dangerous because in the end the profits are not spread across the world, and economies of scale cause this monopoly to appear, which will be hard to mitigate.
Can countries "slow" down China and move production to diversified locations? For that to work, coordinated tariffs for advanced goods from China would have to be introduced, and production reallocated to multiple other countries - very difficult to execute..