How China Built Tech Prowess: Chemistry Classes and Research Labs

Stressing science education, China is outpacing other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles.

China’s domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap.

Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world’s electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Batteries are just one example of how China is catching up with — or passing — advanced industrial democracies in its technological and manufacturing sophistication. It is achieving many breakthroughs in a long list of sectors, from pharmaceuticals to drones to high-efficiency solar panels.

Beijing’s challenge to the technological leadership that the United States has held since World War II is evidenced in China’s classrooms and corporate budgets, as well as in directives from the highest levels of the Communist Party.

A considerably larger share of Chinese students major in science, math and engineering than students in other big countries do. That share is rising further, even as overall higher education enrollment has increased more than tenfold since 2000.

Spending on research and development has surged, tripling in the past decade and moving China into second place after the United States. Researchers in China lead the world in publishing widely cited papers in 52 of 64 critical technologies, recent calculations by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveal.

China’s advances in battery research have helped it gain a dominant position in electric vehicles. Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Last month, China’s leaders vowed to turn the nation’s research efforts up another notch.

A once-a-decade meeting of China’s Communist Party leadership chose scientific training and education as one of the country’s top economic priorities. That goal received more attention in the meeting’s final resolution than any other policy did, except strengthening the party itself.

China will “make extraordinary arrangements for urgently needed disciplines and majors,” said Huai Jinpeng, the minister of education. “We will implement a national strategy for cultivating top talents.”

A majority of undergraduates in China major in math, science, engineering or agriculture, according to the Education Ministry. And three-quarters of China’s doctoral students do so.

By comparison, only a fifth of American undergraduates and half of doctoral students are in these categories, although American data defines these majors a little more narrowly.

China’s lead is particularly wide in batteries. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 65.5 percent of widely cited technical papers on battery technology come from researchers in China, compared with 12 percent from the United States.

A CATL battery factory in Ningde, China, last year.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Both of the world’s two largest makers of electric car batteries, CATL and BYD, are Chinese.

China has close to 50 graduate programs that focus on either battery chemistry or the closely related subject of battery metallurgy. By contrast, only a handful of professors in the United States are working on batteries.

Undergraduates in the United States are becoming interested in battery research, said Hillary Smith, a battery physics professor at Swarthmore College. But, she added, “they are going to compete for a very few spots if they want to do battery research, and most will have to choose something else.”

The roots of China’s battery successes are visible at Central South University in Changsha, a city in south-central China and a longtime hub of China’s chemicals industry.

Central South University has nearly 60,000 undergraduate and graduate students on an extensive, modern campus. Its chemistry department, once in a small brick building, has moved to a six-story concrete building with labyrinths of labs and classrooms.

Zhu Fangjun, a doctoral student, shows the equipment in a chemistry lab at Central South University in Changsha.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

In one lab, which is filled with glowing red lights, hundreds of batteries with new chemistries are tested at the same time. Electron microscopes and other advanced equipment occupy other rooms.

“For us, the experimental equipment is sufficient to meet everyone’s testing needs,” said Zhu Fangjun, a doctoral student.

Peng Wenjie, a professor, has set up a battery research company nearby that employs more than 100 recent doctoral and master’s program graduates and over 200 assistants. The assistants work in relays for each researcher so that the testing of new chemistries and designs continues 24 hours a day.

“There are many people on site to do the tests, so the efficiency is very high,” Professor Peng said.

China’s broadening expertise in manufacturing has created an active debate in other countries, notably the United States, over whether to invite Chinese companies to build factories or whether to try to duplicate what China has accomplished.

The College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Central South University in Changsha, China, has extensive laboratories for battery research.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

“If the U.S. wants to build up a supply chain quickly, the best way is to invite Chinese companies, and they will set it up very quickly and bring technology,” said Feng An, the founder of the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, a nonprofit research group in Beijing and Los Angeles.

Manufacturing makes up 28 percent of China’s economy, compared with 11 percent in the United States. China’s hope is that investments in scientific education and research will translate into efficiency gains that will help lift the entire economy, said Liu Qiao, the dean of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.

“If you have a large manufacturing sector,” he said, “it’s easy to improve productivity levels.”

China’s manufacturing prowess has become a geopolitical issue, however. The government subsidies and policies that have helped fuel the factory boom have left many other countries wary of buying more of China’s exports.

The European Union has imposed formidable provisional tariffs on electric vehicles from China. In the United States, which has also used tariffs to effectively block China’s E.V. companies, political and commercial pressure has impeded ventures with Chinese battery makers.

Peng Wenjie, a professor at Central South University in Changsha, China, in a chemistry lab with rubber safety gloves used for conducting chemical experiments.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Still, China’s battery companies are looking for ways to produce in the United States for the American market. Building and equipping an electric-car battery factory in the United States costs six times as much as in China, said Robin Zeng, the chairman and founder of CATL.

The work is also slow — “three times longer,” he said in an interview.

The United States still leads China in overall research spending, in terms of dollars spent and also in terms of the share of each country’s economy. Research and development represented 3.4 percent of the American economy last year after several years of increases.

But China is at 2.6 percent and rising.

“What happens when China passes the U.S. in R&D and they have the manufacturing base?” asked Craig Allen, the president of the U.S.-China Business Council, which represents American companies doing business in China.

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