Is there any country that doesn't have heavy subsidies/intervention in what it considers strategically important industries?

For example, the US basically has helicopters dumping cash into the agriculture industry nonstop, the CHIPS and Science Act is dumping 280 billion into semiconductors, and the petroleum industry gets around 20 billion a year.

It's not a matter of one country cheating while the others play fair, it's more like everyone cheating and some being more able to get away with it than others (RIP, Bombardier, for example).

Yeah, industrial policy historically has mostly created bad companies, which is why it fell out of favor for a while.

Even China is not foolproof at it; look at how troubled their airliner program has been.

In theory the new ideas that come from competition outweigh the efficiency/brute force of state-backed monopolies. But this depends on them not simply copying the ideas as they come.

Many things aren’t about new ideas. If you heavily subsidize raw materials, or even finished products like solar, you can own an industry. They’ve been successful at it for solar, and now own enough of the inputs that it would be difficult to not include China. They’ve generally done the same with manufacturing (including a ton of infrastructure) such that the rest of the world is now uncompetitive… especially at their scale.

The US is more productive on a per capita basis than China. We are competing just fine.

Like by a whole number factor.