At least in the case of solar and EVs, it's a case of western countries preferring to protect their existing cashcow industries rather than invest to build the industries of the future.

For a brief second, Germany was in a position to become a solar power global player. But our conservative government was more interested in protecting their local, bad industry. Including destroying forests for coal all projections said we would never actually need.

From a EU perspective similar could be said about the US market - no strict worker protections, lobbying, and a general "capital first" mindset over the users/people (see GDPR etc).

That does not explain DeepSeek, nor does it explain the car industry.

The main advantages the Chinese car industry has right now are: they lead in battery R&D, production is highly automated, they iterate quickly, Chinese work culture is extremely competitive and things get done fast, and the Chinese state has policies to promote EV adoption, so there's a huge domestic market.

Note that the last point is different from subsidies to car manufacturers. Cities made it difficult to get license plates for ICE cars. The government encouraged the massive buildout of charging infrastructure. And it used consumer rebates, like California did.