September 24, 2025 | The National Interest
China Has Weaponized Battery Production Against the United States
China has dominated the global battery supply chain through non-market practices, posing a threat to US economic and national security.
September 24, 2025 | The National Interest
China Has Weaponized Battery Production Against the United States
China has dominated the global battery supply chain through non-market practices, posing a threat to US economic and national security.
Excerpt
In the 1980s, a global competitor from Asia upended the American economy with a flood of small, cheap cars that blindsided America’s automakers, and an all-out trade war seemed inevitable.
“While sales of American-made cars have been slumping, Japanese-made Datsuns and Toyotas, Mazdas and Hondas have been streaming through US ports at the rate of some 6,000 vehicles a day,” Time magazine reported in 1981.
From Trade Rivalry to Systemic Threat
Today, the threat from the flood of cheap Chinese imports goes far beyond the United States automotive industry and is far more dangerous than the threat posed by cheap imports of the past. Unlike Japan in the 1980s, China is playing according to a wide range of non-market practices: intellectual property (IP) theft and forced knowledge transfer, monopolization and vertical integration, massive state subsidies and market protection, suppressed wages and forced labor, and global price manipulation and dumping. As the Trump Administration’s 2025 Trade Policy Agenda explains, “technology and IP-intensive sectors are hardly the only ones that are threatened by China’s non-market behavior.”
Using these non-market methods, China has systematically cornered the technology at the heart of next-generation vehicles and mobility: lithium batteries. China’s advanced battery dominance was developed through decades of other non-market practices. Its battery bottleneck also represents a clear and present danger to the security of our military supply chains, the resilience of our core industries, and the efficient functioning of market economies around the globe.
Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Josh Birenbaum is the deputy director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on economic statecraft, illicit finance, global corruption, and the weaponization of radical transparency.