Surely they cannot sell at this price without government subsidies (direct or indirect)?
This possibility paints a frightening picture of the power of government in the global marketplace. The government of any large country can selectively choose to monopolize any specific industry and wipe out all competitors in other countries via subsidies.
It's not a fair playing field for market participants. It makes the whole environment completely unpredictable and dominated by the whims of hundreds of different governments. It promotes government scheming over raw productive capabilities of workers and entrepreneurs; it throws decentralized economic efficiency under the bus in favor of monopolistic, centralized government-oriented strategies.
In such environment, I can understand why tariffs are essential. You can't have a market where participants are playing by different rules of different countries. Also, you can't expect market participants to familiarize themselves with the (possibly secret) policies of hundreds of different governments or be forced to abandon their entire industry in their own country because they happen to be skilled in an industry which is not propped up in their own country as it is in some other foreign country.
Our system is so incredibly asymmetric, right down to the monetary layer. People ought to refuse to participate at all.
BTW, it's not only China which plays these games; you could also say this about US tech/software industry.
Tarrifs don't really help in this situation though. The actions of large governments do not affect just themselves, it's affect other countries too. The affects are much greater than just where to get the cheapest steel. Smart governments can use that to their advantage.
If you look at it from a big picture, one of the major winners of the Ukraine war has been the USA oil and gas industry, as Europe now imports almost 3x the amount of LNG it did before the war from USA [0].
The USA military complex is also doing pretty well, as governments in Europe are allocating more towards defense as Russia seems like a much riskier neighbour than it was 5 years ago.
This possibility paints a frightening picture of the power of government in the global marketplace. The government of any large country can selectively choose to monopolize any specific industry and wipe out all competitors in other countries via subsidies.
It's not a fair playing field for market participants. It makes the whole environment completely unpredictable and dominated by the whims of hundreds of different governments. It promotes government scheming over raw productive capabilities of workers and entrepreneurs; it throws decentralized economic efficiency under the bus in favor of monopolistic, centralized government-oriented strategies.
In such environment, I can understand why tariffs are essential. You can't have a market where participants are playing by different rules of different countries. Also, you can't expect market participants to familiarize themselves with the (possibly secret) policies of hundreds of different governments or be forced to abandon their entire industry in their own country because they happen to be skilled in an industry which is not propped up in their own country as it is in some other foreign country.
Our system is so incredibly asymmetric, right down to the monetary layer. People ought to refuse to participate at all.
BTW, it's not only China which plays these games; you could also say this about US tech/software industry.