https://x.com/agent_of_change/status/2060008557911621920
“We have no chance against this”: the Chinese EV revolution and the failure of the West’s tech war
“We have no chance against this”. That was the reported verdict of Honda’s chief executive Toshihiro Mibe after touring a highly automated factory in Shanghai. Ford’s Jim Farley, surveying the same landscape, says Western carmakers are now “in a fight for our lives”.
A new BBC report from the floor of Auto China 2026 documents the scene the executives are reacting to: a Xiaomi plant outside Beijing rolling out a finished electric vehicle every 76 seconds; BYD’s ultra-fast chargers adding 400 kilometres of range in five minutes; Nio’s near-fully automated lines in Hefei; Huawei’s Maextro luxury sedan now outselling the Porsche Panamera and the BMW 7-Series put together. Foreign brands’ share of the Chinese car market has collapsed from 64 percent in 2020 to just 32 percent today.
This is the world the West’s tech war was supposed to prevent.
For the best part of a decade, Washington and its allies have waged an escalating campaign of tariffs, sanctions, export controls and investment blocks, all designed to keep China stuck at the lower end of the value chain. The Biden administration’s semiconductor war was meant to throttle Chinese AI; Trump’s tariffs were meant to reverse the trade balance; EU duties of up to 45 percent on Chinese EVs are supposed to protect the European industry; US tariffs of over 100 percent are supposed to keep Chinese cars out of the US altogether.
The result, plain to see, is the opposite of what was intended. Far from collapsing, China now dominates more than a few of the world’s most strategically important emerging industries.
The reason is not particularly mysterious. China’s success in EVs, batteries, solar, advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence is the product of precisely the things that neoliberalism has systematically dismantled in the West: long-term state planning, patient public investment, vertically integrated industrial ecosystems, and a coherent national strategy linking research, manufacturing and infrastructure.
Rhodium Group estimates that China has channelled tens of billions of dollars into EV and battery manufacturing in recent years; the International Energy Agency reports that producing a small electric SUV in China is at least 30 percent cheaper than in any advanced capitalist economy. State support, far from being a “distortion”, is the very thing that has made these breakthroughs possible – exactly as it underwrote Britain’s railways in the nineteenth century and the US’s interstate highways and semiconductors in the twentieth.
For the rest of the world, China’s progress is an immense opportunity. Cheaper, better electric cars; ultra-fast charging; affordable batteries; vast solar capacity – these are public goods on a planetary scale, indispensable to any serious response to the climate emergency.
The Global South in particular stands to benefit enormously from access to Chinese finance, infrastructure, innovations and economies of scale. In Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa, Chinese renewable energy and EVs are accelerating decarbonisation at a remarkable pace, whilst stimulating modernisation and improving living standards.
As the BBC report tellingly notes, even Western capital is starting to figure out where the centre of gravity has shifted. Stellantis has just signed a €1bn deal with Dongfeng to produce Peugeots and Jeeps in China, is bringing Dongfeng’s Voyah electric brand into Europe, and is exploring building Chinese-designed cars at a plant in France. Volkswagen is paying $700m for access to XPeng’s software, having admitted it cannot develop the equivalent fast enough at home. Toyota, Hyundai, Ford and Nissan are quietly expanding R&D in China rather than away from it. As XPeng’s He Xiaopeng puts it: “We study each other, so we trust each other, so we help each other.”
That is the choice the West now faces. It can carry on raising tariff walls and sanction regimes, and pay the geopolitical and ecological costs of trying to “stop China’s rise”. Or it can do what the more clear-sighted of its own companies are already starting to do: cooperate, learn and build. China’s success need not come at anyone else’s expense. The model on offer is partnership; it is the West’s containment strategy, not China’s rise, that is making the world poorer.
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