&gt;...then keeping 50,000 workers employed at Sharp seems like a smart bet, compared to keeping 100 people employed at some nimble, fast-moving startup.<p>Where does the money to subsidize those jobs come from? Are you seriously suggesting that sucking subsidy money out of the productive economy to pay for those jobs is not depressing demand? All our economies could do with some of this magic money, it sounds like it would solve all our problems.<p>&gt;...More so, Japanese electronics firms still hold great global market share...<p>Japan functionally has two economies, an export economy and a domestic economy (of course they&#x27;re not completely decoupled, as Sharp shows). It&#x27;s managed to maintain a fairly competitive export economy because those companies have to cope with foreign competition, but the domestic situation has festered for a whole generation. It seems like China is following the same pattern.