How Chinese Technology, Battery Licensing, Critical Minerals and Western Automakers Are Rewriting America’s Industrial Relationship With Beijing
By Craig Bushon | The Craig Bushon Show We Read Between the Lines to Get to the Bottom Line
For years, Washington has been watching America’s industrial front door. Chinese electric vehicles were hit with trade barriers, Chinese-linked battery projects became political flashpoints, governors fought over factories and Congress opened investigations. Billions of taxpayer dollars were committed to rebuilding domestic battery manufacturing, and Republicans and Democrats increasingly agreed on at least one proposition: the United States could not allow its industrial future to become dangerously dependent on China.
Americans were therefore taught to recognize the threat in a familiar form — a Chinese automobile, carrying a Chinese badge, built by a Chinese company, arriving at an American port. But that may be the wrong door entirely.
China does not necessarily need to own an American automobile factory or establish thousands of dealerships to become increasingly important to the technology underneath America’s next industrial economy. Technology can enter through licensing agreements, engineering can enter through partnerships, and intellectual property can cross borders without the company that owns it ever owning the American factory. Critical minerals can be mined on one continent, processed on another and incorporated into a product that eventually carries a “Made in America” label. And battery technology developed for automobiles is now moving into something even more strategically important: the electrical grid and the data centers powering artificial intelligence.
That leaves America with a question considerably more complicated than where something was assembled. Who owns the building — and who owns the technology inside it?
Ford, CATL and the New Meaning of American Manufacturing
Ford may provide the clearest American case study. Its battery strategy originally included the massive BlueOval SK venture with South Korea’s SK On, a partnership that included battery manufacturing in Kentucky and Tennessee and was promoted as part of America’s effort to establish a domestic EV supply chain. But Ford was simultaneously pursuing another strategy. In 2023, Ford entered a technology-licensing arrangement with CATL, China’s battery giant, for LFP battery production at Ford’s BlueOval Battery Park Michigan.
The corporate structure was the important part. Ford owns the factory, owns the manufacturing equipment and employs the workers, but Ford licenses CATL’s LFP cell technology, manufacturing processes and associated know-how, with CATL personnel providing technical assistance and training. That arrangement generated intense political scrutiny precisely because it challenged the traditional distinction between foreign ownership and domestic manufacturing. CATL did not need to own the factory. The technology could cross the Pacific without the ownership doing the same.
By June 2026, Ford had produced full LFP cells at the Michigan plant as it moved through production validation toward market-ready cells.
Then the story moved beyond automobiles. Following Ford’s restructuring of its EV strategy and the dissolution of the BlueOval SK structure, Ford took control of the Kentucky battery facilities and began repositioning Glendale, Kentucky toward large-scale stationary energy storage. Ford launched Ford Energy as a wholly owned subsidiary on May 13, 2026, committing roughly $2 billion over two years, with first customer deliveries targeted for late 2027. Trade and general-interest reporting on the launch, including E&E News/POLITICO and multiple battery-industry publications, identifies the LFP technology behind the Kentucky operation as licensed from CATL under Ford’s existing agreement, and Ford has publicly framed the Kentucky pivot as leveraging that licensed chemistry rather than a newly negotiated one.
Ford Energy’s flagship DC Block is a 20-foot containerized battery-storage system built around 512-amp-hour prismatic LFP cells with approximately 5.45 megawatt-hours of capacity per unit, offered in two-hour and four-hour configurations, and Ford is targeting roughly 20 gigawatt-hours of annual energy-storage capacity. These are not simply backup batteries for homes. Ford is targeting utilities, industrial customers and data centers, and on May 18, 2026, five days after the Ford Energy launch, the subsidiary signed a five-year framework agreement allowing EDF Power Solutions North America to procure as much as 20 gigawatt-hours of Ford battery-storage systems, with deliveries beginning in 2028.
Follow that progression and it runs from Chinese battery technology and know-how through American-owned manufacturing and American workers into American grid storage and American data centers. That does not make the finished product Chinese. But American final assembly does not necessarily make the underlying technological supply chain independent of China either, and that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
CATL Is Not a Chinese State-Owned Company
Precision matters here. CATL is not a Chinese state-owned enterprise. It is publicly traded and privately controlled, and there is no factual basis for simply describing CATL as owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
But that does not end the national-security discussion. Research and reporting have documented Communist Party organizational activity within CATL, something that exists across significant portions of China’s private corporate sector. More importantly, the United States Department of Defense placed CATL on its Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies in January 2025, and CATL remained on the updated list published in June 2026. CATL disputes that designation and has sought its removal.
Another distinction matters just as much: the Section 1260H list is not a general sanctions list, and CATL’s presence on it does not generally prohibit an American private company from conducting business with the firm. Instead, federal law imposes increasingly significant restrictions on Department of Defense contracting with designated companies.
That produces an extraordinary juxtaposition. CATL is a privately controlled Chinese corporation rather than a Chinese state-owned enterprise, yet the Pentagon has designated it a Section 1260H Chinese military company — a designation CATL rejects — while Ford legally licenses CATL technology for American battery manufacturing. Those facts can coexist, and Americans deserve to decide for themselves how significant that relationship is.
General Motors Just Made a 20-Year Decision
Then there is General Motors. On August 4, 2026, GM and China’s state-owned SAIC Motor signed a 20-year extension of their joint venture. The original partnership was established in 1997 and was approaching its 2027 expiration, and instead of winding it down, GM extended the relationship through 2047.
That decision came after GM’s position in China deteriorated dramatically from its peak. GM sold more than four million vehicles in China in 2017, but by 2025 its sales there had fallen to less than half that level and the company had recorded more than $5 billion in charges as it restructured its Chinese operations. GM did not leave. It recommitted for another generation.
And the new relationship is not simply about building American-engineered automobiles for Chinese consumers. SAIC-GM plans at least 30 new-energy vehicles by 2030 using increasingly localized platforms, software and engineering. Vehicle development is being conducted through the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center in Shanghai, and the venture introduced its Xiao Yao architecture for electrified vehicles in 2025.
Then consider the Buick Electra E7. GM describes the Electra sub-brand as a benchmark for local technology development, the E7 is built on the Xiao Yao architecture and designed by the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center, and GM’s own communications describe the vehicle as developed in China. Think about that distinction. The Buick badge is American. The vehicle development occurred in China.
And China-developed Western-brand automobiles are beginning to move outward. Under the extended joint venture, the Electra E7 becomes the first premium new-energy model SAIC-GM exports, with shipments beginning in October 2026, and GM has identified the Middle East, Africa, South America, Mexico and Asia-Pacific as target regions. GM has been explicit that these Chinese-built vehicles are not currently headed to the United States, and that distinction should not be blurred. Neither should the historical significance.
For decades, the relationship largely looked like this: Western capital and Western engineering flowed into Chinese manufacturing to serve the Chinese consumer. Increasingly, another model is emerging, in which a Western brand draws on combined Chinese and Western engineering inside a Chinese technology ecosystem and sells the result to a global consumer. China was once where Western automobile companies went primarily to manufacture. Increasingly, it is also where they go to engineer.
Volkswagen: Who Is Learning From Whom?
Volkswagen offers another revealing example. Under its “In China, for China” strategy, Volkswagen Group China Technology Company, CARIAD China and Chinese automaker XPeng developed Volkswagen’s China Electronic Architecture, or CEA. Two of those organizations are Volkswagen subsidiaries, so CEA should not simply be described as Chinese technology, and Volkswagen has said its collaboration with XPeng on the architecture has since concluded, with development now handled by Volkswagen itself.
But Volkswagen describes the CEA program as demonstrating full end-to-end capability inside China — from concept and engineering through validation and mass production — with the first CEA-equipped vehicle, the ID. UNYX 07, produced at the Volkswagen Anhui plant. And the speed is remarkable. Volkswagen says it moved the architecture from concept to production in approximately 18 months, the fastest development timeline the company says it has ever achieved for an entirely new electronic architecture while maintaining its existing validation requirements.
The architecture reduces the number of electronic control units by roughly 30 percent and provides the computing foundation required for increasingly software-defined automobiles. Reuters has reported that Volkswagen intends to build most of the vehicles it offers in China on the architecture by 2030, with company officials saying it enables development up to approximately 30 percent faster and 40 percent cheaper than the German-developed MEB platform. Volkswagen’s own announcement frames the savings somewhat differently, citing development cycles shortened by up to 30 percent and development costs for new models reduced by up to 50 percent in selected key projects.
But there is an important counterweight. Volkswagen is not currently taking CEA and installing it throughout its Western-market vehicles. For Europe and North America, Volkswagen is pursuing a separate next-generation electronic architecture through its relationship with American EV manufacturer Rivian. In effect, Volkswagen appears to be maintaining two increasingly distinct technology tracks: a China-oriented architecture developed inside China, and a Western-oriented architecture being developed through the Rivian relationship.
The question is not whether Volkswagen has somehow become Chinese, because it obviously has not. The question is why one of Germany’s greatest industrial companies concluded that competing in China required developing vehicles differently, faster and increasingly inside China’s technology ecosystem. Who is learning from whom now?
Chinese Technology Underneath a Western Badge
This is where the story moves beyond vehicles intended primarily for China. Stellantis has invested heavily in Chinese EV manufacturer Leapmotor and controls 51 percent of Leapmotor International, the joint venture established to export, distribute and manufacture Leapmotor vehicles outside Greater China. But the relationship is moving beyond selling Leapmotor-branded automobiles overseas.
Reuters reported in April 2026 that Stellantis was in advanced talks with Leapmotor over an Opel-branded electric SUV, and on May 8, 2026, Stellantis announced the expanded partnership publicly. The plan adds a production line at the Figueruelas plant in Zaragoza, Spain — a long-standing Opel production site — to build an all-new Opel C-segment electric SUV, with a potential start of production in 2028. Leapmotor’s own B10 compact SUV is slated for the same plant, and the Opel model is expected to share that vehicle’s architecture, with Opel handling design work in Rüsselsheim while the electric drivetrain, battery system and key electronic components come through Leapmotor and the Leapmotor International joint venture.
That distinction is enormously important, because the hypothetical is beginning to become reality in Europe: Chinese-developed technology underneath a legacy Western automobile badge. The critical question is therefore no longer merely whether Chinese automobiles will be exported to the West. It is whether Chinese-developed automotive technology will increasingly appear underneath Western automobile brands, and those are fundamentally different pathways into a market.
Follow the Battery Backward
Now move upstream, because every battery begins somewhere else — with lithium, graphite, manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and the rare-earth elements used in certain motors and other technologies. Cobalt itself is not a rare-earth element, and its importance to battery demand is changing rapidly as LFP chemistry expands. LFP batteries contain neither nickel nor cobalt, which is significant. But eliminating cobalt does not necessarily eliminate Chinese supply-chain leverage. It can move the leverage somewhere else.
The International Energy Agency’s 2026 critical-minerals analysis shows extraordinary concentration across several processing markets. For gallium, graphite, manganese and rare earths, the IEA finds that the top refiner, China, accounts for more than 90 percent of global supply, with rare earths in that measure referring to the magnet elements specifically. That is the distinction Americans frequently miss, because owning minerals underground and controlling what happens to those minerals after they leave the ground are entirely different forms of power. The modern supply chain runs from mine to concentrate to refining and processing, then into cathode and anode production, cell manufacturing, battery packs and finally the software and control systems inside the finished product. The country controlling the mine does not necessarily control that chain. Processing is power.
Congo and the Human Cost
The Democratic Republic of Congo remains one of the clearest illustrations of another uncomfortable part of this story. Congo produced an estimated 73 percent of global mined cobalt in 2025, and for years investigations have documented serious human-rights and labor problems associated with parts of the Congolese cobalt industry. Amnesty International and Afrewatch’s landmark investigation traced cobalt from artisanal mines employing children into international supply chains and documented at least 80 artisanal miners killed underground in southern Congo between September 2014 and December 2015.
Those dates matter, and we should not take historical figures and present them as though they describe conditions today. But neither has the underlying labor problem disappeared. The United States Department of Labor continues to document serious labor-rights risks in Congo’s cobalt supply chain, and those concerns are not confined exclusively to artisanal mining, because documented abuses have also occurred around industrial mining operations. That complicates the easy assumption that artisanal mining is the problem and industrial mining is automatically the solution. The conditions and risks are different, and neither should be romanticized.
There has also been progress. The African Development Bank reported that its PABEA-Cobalt initiative had removed more than 9,000 children from artisanal cobalt mining and reintegrated them into schools or vocational programs by the end of 2024. That belongs in this story too, because an honest accounting should document improvement wherever it occurs just as aggressively as it documents abuse.
Owning the Mineral Is Not the Same as Controlling the Industry
Congo has repeatedly attempted to capture more of the economic value created by the minerals beneath its soil. An interministerial order dated June 29, 2026, and disclosed publicly by Reuters on August 6, prohibits the export of copper and cobalt concentrates outright, part of a policy effort stretching back more than a decade that includes earlier measures in 2013, 2019 and 2023.
Those efforts have not always succeeded. Domestic processing capacity remains a constraint, previous restrictions have required exemptions or waivers, and the latest order preserves a waiver mechanism at the mines minister’s discretion. The practical disruption also looks smaller than the headline suggests, because Congo already exports most of its copper as refined cathode rather than concentrate. In the first quarter of 2026, the country shipped 696,725 tonnes of copper cathodes against roughly 54,000 tonnes of copper concentrate.
But the underlying lesson is important: a country can possess enormous mineral wealth and still watch much of the industrial value get captured somewhere else. That lesson applies far beyond Congo.
America’s Real Vulnerability May Not Be Underground
When Americans hear that China dominates critical minerals, it is easy to imagine China simply possesses resources America does not, and sometimes geology genuinely is the constraint. But frequently the strategic bottleneck lies somewhere else — in mining permits, processing plants, refining capacity, chemical manufacturing, infrastructure, energy costs, environmental requirements, capital investment, workforce, community opposition and decades of sustained industrial policy.
China did not merely acquire mineral resources. It built enormous portions of the industrial system required to transform those resources into usable technologies. That distinction matters enormously when Washington talks about reshoring manufacturing, because a factory is the visible part, and the supply chain underneath it can extend around the planet.
What Does “American-Made” Actually Tell Us?
Imagine a battery rolling off a production line in Michigan. The building is in America, the company is American, the workers are American and the manufacturing equipment belongs to the American company. But important cell technology and manufacturing know-how are licensed from a Chinese technology company, the materials may originate somewhere else, and the processing may happen somewhere else.
So what does “American-made” tell us, and what does it leave out? There are really several different questions buried inside that phrase: where the product was manufactured, who owns the factory, where the intellectual property originated, where the manufacturing equipment came from, where the minerals were mined, where they were refined and processed, and who controls the software and the critical technology. Those answers do not have to point to the same country.
From an employment and manufacturing perspective, an American-built battery can absolutely be American-made. But from a technological and national-security perspective, the analysis becomes considerably more complicated, because manufacturing independence and technological independence are not necessarily the same thing. And that distinction becomes even more consequential when the battery stops powering an automobile and begins supporting the electrical grid, a hyperscale data center, or the infrastructure required to train artificial-intelligence models.
Isn’t This Just Globalization?
There is an obvious and legitimate criticism of this argument. American companies have relied on foreign technology for generations — Japanese, German, South Korean, British, French — and American automakers themselves operate around the world. So why should Chinese technology be treated differently?
The answer cannot simply be that China is foreign, because foreign technology is not inherently dangerous. The question is whether America can replace strategically critical technology or a supply chain when its principal source operates within the jurisdiction of the nation Washington itself identifies as its foremost long-term strategic competitor.
The United States government already treats certain Chinese technological dependencies differently because of national-security concerns involving critical infrastructure, telecommunications, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, military-civil fusion and supply-chain resilience. That does not mean every Chinese company represents a security threat. It means dependency itself deserves examination, and the correct question is this: if geopolitical relations deteriorated tomorrow, how quickly could America replace what it currently receives from that supply chain? That is not an ideological question. It is an industrial-resilience question.
This Isn’t Evidence of a Secret Chinese Master Plan
That needs to be stated plainly. The evidence presented here does not establish that Beijing secretly designed every one of these corporate arrangements as part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate American industry. Commercial explanations exist, and they are powerful. Western automobile manufacturers need lower costs, Chinese companies have developed highly competitive technologies, and Western companies want access to them. China remains one of the world’s largest automobile markets. Utilities need energy storage, data centers need enormous amounts of electricity, and American policymakers want manufacturing jobs located in America. Every individual decision can therefore make perfectly rational commercial sense.
The national-security question emerges when we stop examining the transactions individually and look at the industrial system collectively — Ford and CATL, GM and SAIC, Volkswagen and XPeng, Stellantis and Leapmotor, layered on top of Chinese mineral processing, battery technology, automotive software, energy storage, the electrical grid, data centers and artificial intelligence. At some point, the question becomes larger than any single deal.
The Back Door to America
Washington spent years preparing for Chinese industry to walk through America’s front door in the form of Chinese automobiles, Chinese factories, Chinese ownership and Chinese brands. Those concerns remain legitimate. But the industrial competition of the 21st century is considerably more sophisticated, because a company does not necessarily have to own your factory to influence the technology inside it. Technology crosses borders through licenses, engineering crosses through joint ventures, software crosses through supplier relationships, intellectual property crosses through partnerships, and minerals travel through global commodity markets. Industrial dependence can exist several layers beneath the logo consumers actually see.
So perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. The question is not simply when Chinese cars will arrive in America. The better question is how much Chinese technology is already arriving inside products carrying American and Western names.
America spent decades worrying that China would learn how to manufacture our products, and it did. Then we worried China would learn how to engineer products capable of competing with ours, and it did that too. Now we need to confront the next question: are Western companies increasingly turning to China’s industrial ecosystem for technologies they need to remain competitive themselves? If the answer were limited to automobiles, that would already represent a profound shift in the global industrial order. But batteries do not stop at the automobile anymore. They are moving into the electrical grid, into industrial infrastructure, into data centers, and therefore into the physical infrastructure supporting the artificial-intelligence economy.
America can own the factory, Americans can work inside it, and an American company’s name can hang over the entrance. All of those things matter. But before Washington declares victory because manufacturing has come home, Americans deserve to know what lies underneath that manufacturing: where the critical materials were mined, where they were processed, who developed the chemistry, who owns the intellectual property, who developed the manufacturing process, who controls the software, what happens if geopolitical relations deteriorate, and how quickly America could replace any technology or supply chain that suddenly became unavailable.
Those are not anti-China questions. They are basic questions of industrial resilience. Because in the industrial competition now unfolding between the United States and China, the most important question may no longer be who owns the factory. It may be this instead: who owns the building — and who owns the technology inside it?
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