Joe Leahy

I think if you talk to European business leaders in China, this is something that they're constantly warning the Chinese about.

They're like, this is unsustainable.

Our politicians are not going to accept this on a long-term basis.

Maybe European companies will transfer more jobs to China, but at some point...

politicians will react against it.

I mean, we already have Trump in the US.

I mean, what are we going to get in other countries?

And same thing in Southeast Asia.

They've been very good in the past at blocking imports that they don't want, but this is very pervasive and very hard to resist.

Oh, I think it's absolutely coming through.

though, of course, it has a powerful political overlay in the United States where people talk about how every bit of Chinese technology is also a piece of surveillance technology that has a role to play in the great power battle between the United States and

and China.

And I actually have a question for Joe on this topic, which is, there is a characterization of China's economy that says it's extremely different from other industrialized high-tech economies in the world, in that it's not competitive in the same sense.

In other words, the targets set by and for the companies are not profit-

so much as market dominance, employment, creating security for China itself.

Is that an accurate characterization or are there kind of subtleties that broad brush miss?

I think it's both.

I mean, it is absolutely a different kind of economy from other market economies, if you like.

You know, we know that at the local government level, there's huge subsidies, and we go through that in our China 2.0 series.

I think it's between three and nine times more subsidized than OECD, normal OECD economies.