Complete nonsense from the FT. You can't innovate if your firms are drowning under a wave of subsidized Chinese exports. There's no margin to invest in that scenario, which is exactly why China does it.

When your economy is dependent on exports, you’re vulnerable. You depend on the goodwill of others to keep receiving your goods. Importers like the U.S. end up holding the cards, which is why there’s been less retaliation than expected on U.S. tariffs. Germany is now experiencing this vulnerability. Its domestic market is being flooded by subsidized Chinese goods, but Germany struggles to get buy-in on a response because German industrial producers are themselves uniquely export-dependent. For them, European tariffs on China are an unacceptable risk because it could lead to Chinese retaliation on their exports. So they’re opposing Europe’s effort to protect its market - see the below paper. The result is European paralysis. Its industrial giants, weakened by Chinese competition at home, become more desperate to hang onto the slice of the Chinese market they still have. They fear the pain of Chinese retaliation and hope they can simply negotiate for relief from Chinese exports. They can’t. China exports out of economic necessity. The longer Europe waits to block these exports, the weaker its firms become and the harder it will be to recover. Better to accept the short-term risk of retaliation than remain frogs in boiling water, facing the certainty of steady deindustrialization. As vulnerable as Germany is, China is walking on a razor’s edge. When China’s trade partners decide they are no longer willing to accept massive volumes of subsidized goods, its economic model will collapse. Despite Europe’s cross-cutting incentives, we can all see that that day is getting closer.

This isn’t debatable. Employment share reflects the relative growth of services, so it’s not the right measure. Here’s absolute manufacturing employment, spot China PNTR:

Computer, enhance

This really isn’t hard. Manufacturing employment *share* isn’t the right way to assess the decline of the sector, because that will decline merely because services grew faster, which isn’t a problem. The number that matters is *absolute* manufacturing employment. And I can see China entering the WTO on that chart:

There's a voluminous literature on the effect of Chinese subsidies on the global steel market. The latest OECD report is here: oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en…