It's not really propaganda but a real-world challenge for us. I worked in the American solar industry and in the span of a few years, China went from irrelevant to eating up most of the world's producers and production. Now they are the overwhelming source of most of the world's solar panels and the American and European companies largely folded because we just couldn't compete with their combination of cheap labor, advanced factories, and state sponsorship.

China has its problems and its risks, to be sure, but it would be dangerous to underestimate their hybrid model of quasi-capitalism, quasi-communism. What is freedom limiting at the small scale (why would I innovate when the government owns me) can become absolute beasts at sufficient economies of scale. When they decide something is of national priority, they can top down refocus much of the national productivity (both money and people) towards it and then spin up a multinational logistics chain behind it across Asia and Africa. Then they scale up and dominate. It's happened to many industries already and just saying "China bad" isn't going to stop it.

It's like a game of Factorio played well, except with a billion workers and a lot of money that can be moved around at will. We see similar effects in the West during controlled wartime economies (when production can be directed to a particular cause), or government subsidies and money injections (like during covid, or with the infrastructure bill). It's also how our military is run, for example, and most of our big companies. Top down control economies have certain efficiencies (and inefficiencies) of scale that a bunch of small businesses don't have. But when it comes to commodity manufacturing, it's hard to beat their hybrid approach.