@snarkweek - It's interesting to see how the Chinese proceed:

Ezra Klein: You had just come from China, and I had just come back from a book tour. And we were talking about something else, but then I asked you how your China trip was, and what you said to me was: Ezra, you have no idea how screwed we are.

Thomas Friedman: Yes, because what you see when you’re there is the product of 30 years of being in the fitness gym. It works like this: A new industry comes along. Let’s call it solar panels. Every major city in China decides they need a solar panel factory. The local government subsidizes it — maybe domestically born, maybe in partnership with a foreign one.

And you end up, in a very short period of time with — I’m making the number up, but 75 solar panel companies. They then compete like crazy against each other in the fitness gym, and five of them survive. Those five are so fit that they can then go global at a price and level of innovation that is very hard for a foreign competitor to deal with — which is why China today basically controls the global solar panel market.

But what you also don’t see is that process of winnowing down from a hundred of those solar panel companies to the five produced a massive explosion of supply chains domestically to feed that industry.

The same thing went on with cars. The same thing goes on with robots. So where you end up five years later is with an interlocking set of supply chains that now, if you’re a young Chinese and say: I just got this idea. I want to produce a shirt that has a pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backward — someone will have it for you tomorrow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-thomas-friedman.html