China has flooded the world with cars. It's hurting everyone.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-...06-p5f2o5.html
"When a high-level US trade delegation meets their Chinese counterparts in Beijing this week a key topic will be China’s subsidies and excess industrial capacity. It’s a reasonable assumption that electric vehicles will be somewhere on the agenda.
EVs are an exemplar for how China’s whole-of-state efforts to sustain its dominance of global manufacturing and gain dominance in strategic industries are, with an economy that is misfiring, threatening to flood global markets and threaten industries elsewhere with cheap exports.
China exacerbated what was already a developing strand of global trade tensions last year when, in response to significant problems within its domestic economy, it decided to stimulate its manufacturing sector rather than deploy incentives to stimulate consumption or, as it has traditionally done, to drive activity in property and infrastructure.
That’s led to significant over-capacity in its factories which, given weak domestic demand, has created the threat of cheap exports undermining manufacturing sectors elsewhere.
In EVs, China introduced a new set of subsidies last year to succeed the $88 billion of incentives to buy EVs that were in place, and phasing down, between 2016 and 2022.
The new four-year scheme, which also gradually tails off, exempts vehicles bought this year and next from up to $6500 of sales tax. In 2026 and 2027 the maximum tax exemption reduces to about $3200.
With domestic demand slowing amid a weakening of the global growth in sales of EVs, however, China is confronting a glut of production that is causing alarm in Europe, its key market for EV exports.
Last year, China’s authorities bristled when the European Union announced it would conduct a 13-month investigation into the state subsidisation of China’s EV sector, with the EU’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, saying the global auto industry was being overrun by cheap Chinese EVs with prices kept “artificially low by huge state subsidies.”..."
**
Our industry didn't stand a chance when we opened up, reduced tarrifs, and everyone else who was much bigger, were die-hard protectionists and mercantilists.