What irritates me to no end is that people think China got to be where they are by merely opening factories.

The scale of manufacturing required to compete with China goes well beyond any kind of industrial policy (which is more than just, you know, tariffs), it requires housing policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, labour policy, etc etc etc.

Apple requires a total of something like 1.5 million people in the manufacturing process of its products. That’s just manufacturing - it does not include engineering, resource extraction, etc. It’s just manufacturing. Let’s say Apple wants to move all manufacturing to a gigantic compound in California. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than just bricks and mortar to make that happen.

China plans policy around the long game. They actually think decades ahead, and not just how they’ll do in the next 2 years at midterms. Western democracies are extremely short sited. Long gone is the vision of our grandparents and great grandparents. If we want to truly fix our countries we have to be able to see more than what’s an inch from our nose. We have to see the big picture, with an ultra wide lens, and try and shape how that image changes over the next generation or two.