China Has Weaponized Battery Production Against the United States

Elaine Dezenski, and Josh Birenbaum

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China has dominated the global battery supply chain through non-market practices, posing a threat to US economic and national security.

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.

According to the Department of Defense, advanced lithium batteries are “essential to thousands of military systems” from drones and lasers to handheld radios and night vision goggles. Batteries are at the heart of high tech, powering laptops and cell phones, and are vital for the power tools on construction sites. Large-scale battery systems are beginning to back up factories, homes, military bases, and entire electrical grids.