The Chinese car thing is ‘funny’ in a glib way to me.
Neolibs can’t admit that unionized auto-manufacturing is one of the few well-paying factory jobs that still exist and need some sort of protectionism to still exist, because protectionism is bad.
Chinese phone companies collaborating with car companies to make a product that has a UI people like is actually because the Chinese are nefarious.
If there was a Chinese company 1/5th as evil as Nestle we’d never hear the end of it. American car companies have been purposely evil in the past in not fixing stuff to be recalled because the loss of life was less expensive than fixing stuff.
I’m not really hyped on these Chinese cars because of the union jobs that would be lost, and I’m automatically distrustful of cars that are more iPad than car (I don’t think I’d like Tesla’s even if they didn’t kill people because repairability is important).
There is some problem with that as you say, but the company doing the poll is pretty well-respected by the west. They were also labelled a foreign agent by Putin at some point, so I looked at their opinion.
This is an interesting op-ed by the guy who runs the polling company, talking about preference falsification.
There’s an estimate that <10% of people in Russia have motive to lie because of power they’d lose if their opinion got out, and the theory is that this is usually constant. Unless Putin is scarier than 2 years ago you can still compare differences in opinion, even if you don’t trust the magnitude. The guy also said that you can look at the positive responses as having a share of neutral because people who aren’t informed just go with the majority instead of saying “idk”.
But no matter how much lying in polls there is, the amount of people worried about sanctions went down compared to 2 years ago, and compared to 2015.
Which makes sense considering how much physical capital western companies left in Russia, since VW can’t take an auto factory back to Germany with them even if they can take some equipment (but not all).