id recommend you look at soldering work, steering, materials used under the body of a chinese car vs a german made one.

That sounds quite reminiscent of America's auto industry, as well as the desktop computer, smartphone, web search, AI, fast food and supermarket industries too.

Man, China's been taking notes.

An interesting explanation I heard is that China had this massive housing crisis that they never allowed to go Boom and clear the system in a few hard years. Instead the problems are lingering with an abysmal local credit market. This is why the local population can't/won't buy much and China either has to produce less or export more. For now they decided to export more to keep the machine going.

The bigger principal problem I have is that I do not understand how the Chinese economy/trade is supposed to work. China is working extremely hard to be completely self sufficient and not import anything. How is trade supposed to work if you do not want anything from your trading partners? What can they sell you besides sovereignty/land...

It will/is be a hard awakening when all those nations start to default/nationalize those projects. That is the point were usually the gunboats show up in the harbor....

Why BYD is cheap? They're heavily vertically integrated, they're ruthless about cutting production costs, they operate in an environment with more manufacturing talent than anywhere else, and they're a young company without many legacy costs.

for example: https://x.com/maxiaoalex/status/2062910018840854722 ( https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/741394 )

What most folks in the USA don't understand, BYD manufactures two types of vehicles. One type is for the domestic market (cheaper and dangerous), the other is for export (meets some semblance of safety). I have heard that the export models are built to higher standards and are more dependable, hence the higher price than domestic models.