A ceasefire in the U.S.-China trade war doesn’t change the fact that Americans are subject to Beijing’s whims when it comes to critical supplies of everything from magnets to minerals. This is not an accident but the result of decades of Beijing’s deliberate practices to build monopolies, dominate supply chains, stifle competition, and foster resource dependencies. But the U.S. and its allies can break China’s stranglehold on the battery supply chain, if they work together now to build the components and mine the minerals that go into advanced batteries, while fighting back against China’s market manipulation.
In our new report, Unplugging Beijing: A Playbook to Reclaim America’s Advanced Battery Supply Chains, we lay out the scale and scope of China’s non-market practices in battery supply chains — dumping, price manipulation, intellectual property theft, monopolies, and forced technology transfers — and, more importantly, say what America can do about it. One key way in which China controls the battery market is through intentional overproduction — making too much of everything — driving prices below profitability in ways that push out competition.
For 2025, Chinese analysts are projecting that China will make twice as many electric cars as the entire global demand from last year. While enormous subsidies and state support cushion Chinese companies, American companies cannot sustain unprofitable production. China’s decision to dump cheap batteries and underlying minerals on global markets sustains their monopolies but harms free markets and open competition. Beijing may finally be acknowledging that its massive overproduction of just about everything is fueling a race to the bottom. But as the central government frets about what Xi Jinping has labeled “disorderly price competition,” local governments in China are still backing absurd strategies to juice production.
such as state-sponsored programs to sell brand new cars as “zero-mileage” used cars — sold at a loss and dumped on foreign markets, but allowing companies to inflate sales numbers to justify factories operating at full tilt. While Beijing deploys a suite of non-market tactics at scale, its price manipulation is especially damaging. Advanced batteries depend on a host of refined minerals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite — that are responsible for most of the cost of the resulting battery. China’s intervention in nickel markets, for instance, has saddled Western producers with unsustainable costs. In lithium, Beijing has driven prices up or down at will, undermining competing U.S. projects.
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