Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument (which has its own pros and cons) is that the Chinese vendors are not competing fair and square. The governmental/industrial coordination in China is quite literally un comparable to Western style industries so the western governments feel they have to protect their local industries. This definitely hurts consumers in the short term, so the whole argument is about long term impacts.
This is bs. Both German and Italian auto industries e.g. have received countless money. FIAT alone got an equivalent of 200B+ euros in state/regional aid in Italy alone (that's ignoring the generous incentives of all the countries they opened plants).
That’s hundreds of billions of dollars before we get to cash subsidies, IP subsidies, central direction, property right differences etc.
The Chinese approach is so different than the western approach that there isn’t broad consensus on how to quantify it, but it’s for sure more than the direct subsidies that something like the WTO was built to negotiate.