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Chinese industry is beating Germany at its own game. Cue panic

6 points| alecco | 3 days ago |economist.com

4 comments

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pu_pe|3 days ago

> “Our companies are competing not only with Chinese rivals, but with the Chinese state budget,”

That's rich coming from the car industry in Germany. Volkswagen is partly owned by the government, and the whole industry has received all sorts of incentives over decades. The result is that they botched the electric transition and are now behind technologically.

bell-cot|3 days ago

Yeah - but long before "electric" was a thing, the German car industry was screwing up in multiple dimensions. Just talk to a few mechanics about the traditional reliability and TCO of German cars, vs. Japanese ones.

bell-cot|3 days ago

tl;dr; - Germany's situation and perspective is far more complicated and conflicted than the headline would suggest. Which is an especially bad situation to be in, when you're a (relatively) little democracy, trying to negotiate with a huge one-party state.