There is a crucial distinction between the way subsidies were wielded in the United States and how they were deployed in China. In the US, subsidies functioned less as industrial strategy and more as a grand confidence trick—a coordinated siphoning of public wealth to prop up a carnival of virtue-signalling schemes whose ultimate effect was to sap the nation’s strength. Whether the architects of this theatre actively sought to weaken their own country is debatable; what is not debatable is that they saw the consequences coming and accepted them with a shrug. National self-sabotage was not an accident; it was collateral they were perfectly willing to pay.
China, by contrast, never lost sight of its ambitions. Every yuan funnelled into its subsidy machine served a clear, if ruthlessly ambitious, goal: to advance Chinese interests, reshape global supply chains, and ultimately place the rest of the world in a subordinate orbit around Beijing. Yes, in the process they built what may prove to be the largest Ponzi scheme in human history—but that was an unintended side effect of hubris, not the mission itself. Their aim was global dominance, not domestic disintegration.
Both nations inflicted wounds upon themselves through their subsidy regimes, but the difference is telling: only in one did the elites look upon the weakening of their own country not as a misstep, but as an acceptable outcome from the very beginning.