Item — HN Reader

Here's just one example where I think, "maybe".

I've been shopping for an Airbrush. These were a dream of mine as a kid. Back then the major brands were Made in the USA and were expensive enough that they were out of reach for 14 year old me.

Today the main companies from back then have "Made in the USA" on their websites but Badger (https://badgerairbrush.com) doesn't look like it's been updated since 2018 and Paasche (https://www.paascheairbrush.com) seems only slightly better.

Another popular and slightly newer brand is Iwata from Japan.

I suspect that Chinese imports have been eating these companies lunch for decades. I suspect that the Chinese government is subsidizing the products and their shipping and artificially lowering the cost and that they have been doing this for a very long time.

1 comments

> I suspect that the Chinese government is subsidizing the products and their shipping and artificially lowering the cost and that they have been doing this for a very long time.

Why would the Chinese government be subsidizing airbrushes of all things? Is that a strategically important industry? Are they planning on capturing the global airbrush market? To what end, exactly?

My first reaction also but think about it. An airbrush isn’t an airbrush but a pneumatic system. An electronic toy isn’t a toy but an electronic system. At a large enough scale and over a long enough time frame.. lots of things are strategically important when you’re talking about the basic ability to manufacture stuff independently

Right? Its like a ballpoint pen. A basic commodity. But there's a lot of challenge in manufacturing the tiny balls and the tips to such a high amount of precision to mass produce quality ones cheaply.

Just looking at the diagram of the airbrush, there's a little bit of complexity there in machining all of that good, quickly, and at scale. Lots of little parts to control it which to work well need to have high quality machining.

https://badgerairbrush.com/images/101_Illustration.jpg