I was rather taken aback when I figured out how brazen China's take on capitalism was.

1) Get a massive loan from the government

2) Buy a bunch of Western shit

3) Sell it on eBay at below cost

4) Profit

There's a step (5) in there where you do the song'n'dance in front of the CCP about how your venture wasn't profitable, too bad, so sad, and then you fuck off and do the same thing under another name but it's almost a formality from what I can tell. It's like this:

here's an extremely technical page for a device I have several of. It's a servo controller. It's hard core. It's Japanese. And it's about $2800. And here's a warehouse in China selling the same thing for about $150 with tax. Cost on that $2800 item is prolly $1900? But since we've shipped generations of technical equipment and machine tools to China for scrap, the used part is like $100 so the new part is only $50 over that.

Now - sometimes they counterfeit this shit. I bought some Yaskawa cables off eBay. From Yaskawa? They're like $300 ea. Off eBay? They're $30... but they'll write you and say 'do you want them in green or orange' and you say 'yaskawa doesn't make them in green or orange' and they say 'answer the question.' (green for power, orange for servo, thanks for asking, by the way I need another three pair). And sometimes they'll say 'hey so we stuck a random-ass label on these, they say 'prototype' and have a made-up company name, if it bugs you take them off with hand sanitizer, they're necessary to get through customs.' But I've plugged those servo drivers into the Internet, they're legit, their serial numbers are genuine, they are the real McCoy (three new, three used, one of which is dead and I need to replace, but it's $150). And the price difference between the $5k/channel I should be paying and the $400/channel I am paying is coming directly from the Chinese Communist Party. There is something utterly delicious about enterprising gray market criminal enterprises subsidizing American manufacturing directly out of Mao's pocketbook.

This seems to be the way Chinese capitalism tends to go: blow a lot of party money so you can get ratfucked by the Triads. Their lithium ventures are going to go the same, only different. Depending on how you count, the CIA has fomented between two and four coups in Bolivia alone since 1960. Any mining deals between China and the Bolivian salt flats are subject to the machinations of the Divide. China, for its part, hasn't pulled off similar skullduggery in... a long time.

If anything, I think this is just another in a long line of examples where Western manufacturers and businesses pivot from "buy cheap things from China" to "compete against cheap things from China."

It's been a long time coming. Everyone got fat and happy building a middle class in the People's Republic but that time is done and now you whine for subsidies from your own governments.