A few labor lawsuits show that in China Tesla wage starts at ~$4.5/hr while BYD ~$1.7/hr. Tesla also limits overtime to 36 hrs/mo by China labor law, while gov allows BYD workers to clock 441.5 raw hours in a single month. Pension and union is basically non-existent. And the reason why ppl work at BYD instead of Tesla is by clocking monstrous overtime they actually make more despite lower hourly pay.

There are reasons why Tesla consistently ranks in China 1st/2nd by sales. One of them is Chinese workers are the ones exploited by sweatshops and a government only nominally communist so they are paying the price, while Western customers are enjoying good ol' NIMBYism.

The dark factory part is simply propaganda, the viral WSJ interview is only about body assembly which is already automated everywhere. The labor intensive part is the general assembly and even they admit this in the video. However here it's like Chinese EV found the silver bullet in car manufacturing.

[0]: https://chinalaborwatch.org/building-byd-szeged-labor-risks-...

Lol, I wonder why. It really is a mystery. Why did we once rule the world pre-1970's and have been waning and decaying ever since? Gee, maybe these Chinese geniuses can figure out the reason for us.

The factory stops being efficient and easily pivoted the second the people running said factory want it to stop. That, in turn, depends on how friendly you are with the country running said factory.

Let's say there's some sort of negotiations going on between the country that hosts the factory and the country that operates the factory, which, in this case, means a country with a government that has a very deep cadre system that gives them control of almost all enterprises, state-owned or otherwise.

The negotiations (whatever it is, let's just say they're economic for an example) reach an impasse. You are the country that has control over the factory. Sure, the host country has the factory, but they don't have the institutional knowledge, intellectual property, or supply chain deals that your firm does.

Do you ignore this leverage? Hell no. You say "it'd be a real shame if we had to find a new place to make our products for your market", which would imply a serious loss of employment in the region and a massive factory complex sitting empty and decaying.

Unless you're talking about the sort of relationship the US and Japan have, the factory's host country now has to consider that possibility.

> Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?

That's literally how pretty much all industrialized and post-industrialized nations' defense manufacturing sectors work to one extent or another. Some munitions and defense systems are incredibly complex. You can't just move the knowledge about their manufacture over in a few corporate wiki pages; you have to have the greybeards teach the young guys by doing. This happens all the time, particularly with nuclear weapons. If you don't do that, the greybeards retire or die off and no one knows how to make this system that the military has speced, tested, approved, and gone through the bureaucracy of acquisition for. This means they either do without or get to start over from scratch at tremendous cost.

Please someone fact check that, as far as I know there are import taxes on Chinese EVs, and protectionist measures. The only "loophole" I know is for vehicles built in the EU, which is fine as it employs local workforce.

And if this were really the issue, why wouldn't BYD build vehicles with swappable control software and hardware? Ship unfinished vehicles to the US and install approved electronics in them?