Are they really? Are they giving more than what state subsidies Silicon Valley companies received from the WW2 radar/radio era, from Shockley semiconductors, to the Traitorous eight[1], to the present day?

To me it seems China is only spending so much because they need to speedrun in a couple of decades what the US achieved in 3 times that, but it also did that with a lot of state subsidies, let's not kid ourselves.

For example, EUV lithography exists because the US state sponsored Sandia Labs for the research, but we're supposed to think "China bad" when the CCP does the same? Same with other SV tech that came out of defense or state sponsored projects.

Also, the way the financial system is set up in the US and they way the VC sector works, is also somewhat of form of state subsidies in disguise since the US gov just prints loads of cheap money, investors would dump it on 100 companies, one would boom to become the world dominator, the other 99 would flop, and get written as a tax write-off, and presto, you have a VC sector that no other country can replicate because they don't own the money printer to the world's reserve currency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight