The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.

It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.

I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:

> massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects

The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.

The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.

It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.

There are two types of protectionism:

1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.

2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.

We all know which country chose which path.

Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.

Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.

We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”

We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.

And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.

In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.

Right down to the shaky real estate markets.