Solar panels, inverters and batteries are not critical infrastructure and I'd wager the jobs impacted are considerably lower than the automotive industry.

I guess it's a bit like the nuclear deterrent. The threat of them raising prices or refusing to sell to other countries might be enough.

For telecom, at least, governments have legislated against Huawei equipment, Nokia is going strong from a European side

Really this is conspiracy level thinking. It's not like there's no car industry in the EU, it's just that it's grown in the low-COL areas like Slovakia and not in high-COL areas like Germany.

Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.

It has. There's an enormous amounts of solar panel manufacturers in china that had to close down, due to the governments ordered over capacity, to try and take over the world. This has led to enormous waste of resources in china.

Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.

The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.

The hunter has truly become the hunted!

> How come this hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc.

It actually began a few months ago regarding solar panels and batteries [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...