While rock-bottom Chinese prices for solar materials and components, for instance, pushed European, Japanese, and U.S. One overlooked secret to China’s renewable energy success is ruthless domestic competition that drives down prices globally. In other words, in some clean industries China now isn’t ripping off innovation but producing breakthroughs. in selling leading-edge equipment globally. Explore the issue.ĬATL now looks to emulate telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co. This article appears in the Winter 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine. BMW’s stringent requirements helped raise CATL’s game high enough for it to become the go-to supplier for other automakers. Eventually, Zeng cut a deal with BMW’s Chinese joint venture to produce electric vehicle batteries. In CATL’s case, founder Robin Zeng ditched his job at a state-owned company in Fujian province and began working on batteries, initially with a former IBM scientist from Taiwan. Beijing and local governments in China also encouraged entrepreneurship, relentless cost-cutting, and foreign investment-even under the turn to state-owned firms that began in 2013 under Xi Jinping. That gave CATL a protected market and a big advantage over South Korean firms, which were ahead at one point technologically and remain big rivals.īut government aid doesn’t fully explain the company’s success. Beijing has mandated that 40 percent of vehicles sold in China by 2030 must be electric.Īs part of its strategy, Beijing denied subsidies for several years to electric vehicles using foreign batteries, making the foreign battery-makers uncompetitive in China. Ltd., or CATL, into the global battery leader involved subsidies and protectionism-unsurprising given China’s goal of dominating the next generation of cars and trucks. According to Sanderson, the industrial policy that helped turn China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. They include an ultra-Orthodox Israeli who has exploited the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the scale of King Leopold II of Belgium, a Chilean whose marriage to the daughter of the country’s dictator helped him dominate the lithium mining business, a onetime pal of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who pitches mining as humanity’s salvation, and a Chinese billionaire who bought an Airbus A319 to chauffer his wife and lover.īatteries are the heart of electric vehicles, and China is at the heart of advanced battery production. While the author is clearly a geek-he says the most exciting part of electric cars is the battery-he has written a rollicking tale of greed, politics, and technology populated by a remarkable assortment of brigands, despicables, and visionaries. Happily for readers, Sanderson hasn’t produced a 288-page guilt trip. Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green, by Henry Sanderson, Oneworld Publications, 288 pp., $27.95, September 2022

Cons of child labor in cobalt mines