> It’s like the western zeitgeist can’t accept that China is simply out-competing them on pure merit.

With a 400m head start in a 1600m race. It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.

Solar and battery technology were two of those areas. China absolutely dumped cheap, mostly inferior solar cells on everybody else to wipe out competing manufacturers until they caught up. And China absolutely subsidized local battery consumption until their manufacturers had critical mass and market share. Even now, the RISC-V ecosystem mostly relies on China funding students to do the grunt work of porting everything over.

This is a smart thing. We used to do stuff like this in the US. (See: VHSIC, VLSI project, Sematech, etc.)

And now, BYD appears to be, at this point, simply a superior manufacturer and it doesn't appear to be close. It absolutely grinds my gears that I have to root for BYD to come into the US and bankrupt the automotive companies to finally move their asses, but we have been here before--back in the 1970s with Japan producing better cars.