The country of stubborn boomers that want to have their cake and eat it
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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What are you on about? China is Germany's biggest trade partner and most people here like what they produce. And that's fair enough since they do a good job. But let's be real there's nothing wrong with for example having tariffs on products that the manufacturing powerhouse china deliberately sell at a loss to gain monopolies. It's in their 5 year plan and kudos for them for having such outlook, Germany certainly lacks planning that far ahead (or any planning tbh, we have a conservative government atm cries).
Chinese firms don't sell at a loss. Western firms operate with oversized profit margins. The labor and materials that go into a Chinese EV or a solar panel or a plastic widget or steel girders are all globally commoditized. What separates Chinese exports from EU domestic products are rents. Enormous, economy-crippling rents.
And that's what these tariffs seek to protect.
Germany has plenty of economic planning. It's just happening in the Zurich banking industry, not the Berlin parliament. The goal of German policy is to maximize profit per unit of labor, rather than value per unit of materials.
That Germans are revolting at the domestic plan stems from these strangling profit margins.
The EU disagrees with you after a thorough investigation. China has been giving its EV manufacturers massive state subsidies for a long time now, this is not news to most of us, just you for some reason....
Police investigating themselves inevitably find the people they are policing were in the wrong.
Chinese manufacturers benefit from the state investment in infrastructure and the at-cost production of utilities through SOEs. They produce professionals out of universities funded with state tax dollars who do not carry enormous personal debts. They have a large high speed transportation network that reduces delivery delays and mobilizes much of the idle workforce.
In any other country, we'd acknowledge this as capital investments in the economy at-large. In China, we pretend that this is some kind of unfair business advantage.