It’s worker protection, something I thought most people here on Lemmy agreed with.

If the main concern was ever workers protection the economic system wouldn’t rely on capitalizing the excess production value of said workers. They don’t really care about workers, they care about the profit those workers produce. Otherwise the workers would be the ones running the company and benefitting from their own labor instead of shareholders.

No western nation can compete with China on price without completely gutting 7 decades of worker, social, economic, and environmental protection laws.

No western country is willing to invest in the infrastructure and supply lines necessary to to even think about competing with the China’s prices, even with a large tarrif.

Worker, and environmental laws are not the main source of price difference, and I’m not sure what you really mean by social and economic laws. The biggest advantage they have is that their country invested billions of dollars into their infrastructure for production capacity while most of the west were busy giving billion dollar companies and the wealthy tax breaks.

As opposed to illiberal democracies like China who do it by not allowing anyone free access to their market in the first place?

Liberal* as in John Locke’s theory of merging limited government and a free market. Illiberal democracy is not a economic and political theory. China is not being hypocritical because China never claimed to participate in free market economics…