The West keeps asking how much China subsidises its industries. That is the wrong question.
TL;DR The Western debate about China’s industrial rise fixates on subsidies, but the real driver is commercialisation: the ability to take technology from laboratory to global market faster than any competitor. Government VC funds invested $184 billion in AI firms over two decades, but the resulting companies, BYD, CATL, DeepSeek, succeeded through state-funded domestic competition, […]

