China Takes the Wheel

 https://dissentmagazine.org/article/chinese-automakers-electric-vehicles-labor/

~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~

The Chinese electric vehicle boom offers an opportunity to push manufacturers to produce cheaper EVs, while bolstering unionization and decarbonization in the United States.

Jeremy WallaceFall 2026The Beijing Auto Show in April 2026 (Kevin Frayer/Getty)

The 2026 Beijing Auto Show sprawled over two cavernous exhibitions across seventeen halls, featuring 1,451 different cars and attracting well over a million visitors. The displays presented an automotive cornucopia with Chinese characteristics: livestreaming influencers, mini-cars, SUVs with rooftop tents, a cute sedan dressed up as My Little Pony, and too many outrageous flying car concepts. But the array of electric vehicles (EVs) made in automated Chinese factories with attractive prices were the obvious stars of the show. Attendees’ genuine excitement to see what was on display was palpable—I was physically elbowed as I entered the event’s two-and-a-half-mile perimeter from the north. The show’s message was clear: The future has arrived, and it will not replicate the past.

U.S. auto executives, such as Ford’s CEO Jim Farley, have not been shy about their astonishment that Chinese automakers have leapfrogged their American counterparts. During a 2023 test drive of a Changan EV in Chongqing, his CFO riding shotgun remarked: “Jim, this is nothing like before. These guys are ahead of us.” Not long afterward, Farley shipped a Xiaomi SU7 to the United States and drove it for six months before admitting that it was one of “the best in the business” for both its cost and design. “I don’t want to give it up.”

This spring I toured Xiaomi’s factory in Beijing, where roughly 2,000 employees take in raw materials and components and transform them into over 300,000 premium vehicles a year. No one will be surprised that the main assembly line was primarily composed of robots, but the rest of the facility teemed with them as well. Massive casting machines shaped large chunks of the auto bodies, radically cutting down the number of separate welds and bolts needed during assembly. Forklifts that looked like super-sized Roombas, yet were capable of carrying a phalanx of door panels or bumpers, whizzed around the factory floor. The few workers on site used remotes to move cranes, checked machine displays, sat in glass rooms overlooking the operation, and drove new vehicles off to the testing grounds.

Has such a future arrived in the United States? Partly. Americans can already buy competent EVs: Tesla makes them, and Hyundai’s are genuinely good. But cheaper options are not on offer. The models from China, available in the rest of the world, stop at the U.S. border due to a wall of tariffs and security rules. The result is the personal-vehicle version of our passenger-rail predicament: Americans are stuck with the sluggish Amtrak, while much of the world zips along on high-speed trains. Domestic protectionism, meanwhile, hasn’t provided the space for a best-in-show champion but has instead left us with expensive mediocrities and a Big Three retreating into ever-larger SUVs. Even the decent non-Chinese options are losing where they do compete: in Europe and Asia, Tesla has been overtaken by the Chinese manufacturer BYD, with another half a dozen rivals nipping at their heels.

The labor left is too quick to make common cause with the national security blob in hyping the China threat, and Democrats’ reflexive protectionism fuels hawkish foreign policy arguments more than it helps workers or consumers. EVs, moreover, are also utterly crucial to fighting climate change. This summer looks to be the hottest in history, and while politicians may fear talking about it, the crisis only grows.

In fact, this moment is an important juncture to consider the prospects for a broader U.S. industrial strategy around EVs. With the right policies, Chinese competition can be used to discipline capital toward cheaper cars, to encourage decarbonization, and—critically for a labor movement that has spent decades locked out of the right-to-work South—to establish a unionized beachhead in what will become the auto industry’s dominant sector.

 

 

Given their clear technological advantage, Chinese automobile manufacturers already look set to dominate the world market. A recent report from the Rhodium Group, a global policy and economic research firm, clarifies that these offerings are so attractive not primarily because of subsidies, but because of vertical integration and rigorous domestic competition that has sparked innovation and expanded the range of what is possible. The competition in China is so fierce that firms’ profits from their home market—the world’s largest—are almost nonexistent, and even industry leader BYD is skating on thin ice with large debts. This intensity has generated a fear of “involution,” in which firms might sacrifice future-looking investments in their efforts to survive the gauntlet. The Chinese government is concerned, but progress in tackling the problem has been limited.

Given their affordability, new energy vehicles—including both full EVs and hybrids—made up 60 percent of Chinese auto sales in April and May. With Chinese firms ready to offload inventory and prop up their narrow profit margins, exports have exploded as well. Chinese vehicles have popped up everywhere: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Europe, Mexico, and even North Korea. In 2025, Chinese brands accounted for 15 percent of new car sales in Mexico, up from 1 percent five years ago. In the United Kingdom, more than one in five new cars last year were made in China, and they took nearly a quarter of sales in Thailand.

In a reversal of previous trends, Western nations are increasingly opening their markets to facilitate technology transfer: Canada, for instance, recently signed a deal to allow 49,000 cars from China into the country as part of an effort to protect the domestic auto industry by building connections to the firms on the leading edge of this transition. China also exported 922,000 cars to Europe in 2025, up 29 percent from the previous year.

The glaring exception is the United States, where the Chinese EV revolution remains something that we read about on screens rather than see on our streets. The U.S. tariff rate on Chinese vehicles is over 100 percent, making the economics prohibitive, and the cars come with additional legal barriers related to purported security threats. The uniquely American resistance to Chinese EVs, whether imported or manufactured domestically, is bipartisan, but the offered reasons for that resistance are rarely interrogated. Most complaints, such as those in Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell’s Connected Vehicle Security Act, put national security concerns front and center. But privacy is a known problem with the obvious solution of data localization: The servers that hold American data could be required to reside in the United States.

Oren Cass, the chief economist at the conservative think tank American Compass, meanwhile, has focused on older concerns about intellectual property theft. However true this might have been in the past, such arguments ignore the present reality that Chinese battery and EV technology far exceeds what America is producing—and at a much larger scale—while also being cheaper. If anything, it is the government and firms in China that are worried about technology transfers by U.S. automakers that might take their innovations and domesticate them in Detroit. Indeed, this is precisely what such U.S. industrial policy seeks to achieve.

In reality, those who fear Chinese vehicles are not a single bloc. They are two groups, and they want the wall for opposite reasons.

The first is the incumbent producers, including the transplants—Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and the German automakers—whose profitable American factories sit overwhelmingly in the right-to-work South, where they have kept their workforces union-free for decades. These are the firms with the clearest stake in keeping cheap competition out. Protectionism sold as a defense of American auto jobs is therefore in large part a defense of nonunion work.

The domestic Big Three have whiffed again and again with EVs. In general, their own offerings have been poorly made and poorly timed. For example, Ford’s electric version of its bestselling F-150 truck never approached its promised entry price of $40,000, and the rare units that did sell often went for north of $70,000. They have done little to invest in the battery-charging infrastructure that would allay consumer anxiety about mileage. Their extractive dealer networks have undercut these meager efforts, worried about their ability to bleed consumers dry without expensive service departments that EVs make obsolete.

General Motors, already routed in China after plummeting sales in the country, also wants the home market kept safe. Ford is the odd one out: Farley has publicly urged Washington to bring in Chinese technology through joint ventures and has said that the company will partner with Chinese firms abroad if it cannot do so at home.

Labor’s worries are different. The unions fear competition less than repetition. The last great wave of foreign investment in American autos during the 1980s did not lift the United Auto Workers: It built the nonunion Southern counterweight that helped hollow it out, leaving organized labor concentrated in an ever-shrinking industrial base in the Midwest. “‘Free trade’ has killed 5 million manufacturing jobs and eroded wages & benefits for millions more,” Jonah Furman, the communications director for the UAW, recently declared. “Is that price worth paying for our high-exploitation treats?” Even while making the case for Chinese investment, scholar Jake Werner conceded that the past success of the Japanese transplants “came at a cost to workers by lowering labor standards.” The worry that it could happen again is understandable, but it deserves a better answer than reflexive protectionism.

These two lines of argument pull in opposing directions: The automakers want the wall to stop competition, while labor has no stake in protecting a nonunion transplant model that has only ever undercut it. Labor’s interest should be in making sure that when the next wave of investment arrives it does so on union-friendly terms.

 

 

Frustration with the total exclusion of Chinese EVs and their advanced technology at cheap prices from the U.S. market is real and growing. American influencers have been wowed by the quality and price of their offerings. A Cox Automotive survey found that 38 percent of Americans would consider a Chinese vehicle; for Gen Z the number was a whopping 69 percent. Fundamentally, electric motors are a superior technology to the controlled explosions of internal combustion engines. Even the most efficient of these cars lose two-thirds of the energy in gasoline to heat and exhaust, whereas upwards of 90 percent of a battery moves an electric vehicle. While we could settle for the mediocre options available today, the buildup of pressure against the tariff wall could also translate into significant leverage.

The question for the left is whether it wants to be involved in shaping the terms by which these technologies arrive or to continue to stick its head in the sand. In truth, the Big Three are not that big anymore, accounting for less than 40 percent of the U.S. market and a small and shrinking share of auto sales globally. Unless something changes, the presence of these companies will continue to evaporate, along with a major slice of the American labor movement.

If good union jobs are to be a long-term prospect in the auto sector, then establishing a foothold of unionized jobs in EV parts and assembly plants is required. But Xiaomi also showcases the need to move beyond the narrow focus on final assembly plants. The competitive factories of today do not require the scale of labor of post-1980s foreign-invested plants, let alone of the Ford River Rouge complex. As a result, securing a solid position of unionized workers in the electrified transport sector is a defensive necessity, not a recipe for full restoration of the heydays of industrial unionism. Establishing that position keeps labor from being stranded on a fossil-fuel island.

At present, organized labor is understandably nervous about EVs because the Big Three, especially Ford, are trying to use the transition to crack open spaces for nonunion jobs in new facilities. Prior attempts to organize the EV supply chain, moreover, have a mixed record. Take BlueOval SK, a joint venture between Ford and South Korea’s SK On. The venture included a new facility to build EV batteries in Glendale, Kentucky. It was lavishly state backed, receiving a Department of Energy loan of over $9 billion in December 2024, plus a $250 million forgivable loan from Kentucky, against a promise of 5,000 jobs. Even so, while automakers GM and Stellantis agreed to union neutrality in their battery joint ventures, Ford hid behind the joint venture structure to resist labor organizing.

In August 2025, the workers at BlueOval SK won a major union election in the anti-union American South—the same month the plant began production. Just under a year later, Ford and SK On announced they were dissolving the venture, citing softening EV demand and the rollback of federal support following the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The National Labor Relations Board certified the union in January 2026, weeks after the workers had already been told the plant was closing. Over 1,600 workers lost their jobs; the plant was repurposed for grid-scale battery storage. They had organized one of the most subsidized factories in the country, won a historic election, and it bought them nothing.

It is worth dwelling on the lessons of this episode. Ford could walk away from billions in public money, thousands of promised jobs, and a freshly certified union the moment the business case wobbled because nothing was forcing its hand in the domestic marketplace. But if Ford knew that Chinese EVs would soon be available for American consumers, it might have been less cavalier.

The current moment offers a historic opportunity to discipline capital to produce and supply cheaper vehicles, while strengthening the country’s flailing projects of unionization and decarbonization. Whereas in the 1980s foreign firms invested in the United States with few constraints, the door for Chinese investment remains closed today. The possibility of opening that door, and the potential profits that Chinese firms so desperately desire, gives policymakers and unions real leverage to push for favorable terms that support both consumers and workers.

Beyond basic data and cybersecurity provisions, two other conditions would be critical to make Chinese investments attractive. The first is union neutrality, not just for individual factories but the whole sector. The second is a guarantee that factories would do more than provide final assembly kits of parts made in China. That means creating partnerships with domestic firms, real technology transfer, and local-content rules that keep American workers producing the upstream materials like rubber, steel, and glass.

Industrial competitiveness in China is not the result of singularly heroic firms but extensive ecosystems of suppliers, component manufacturers, and machine-tooling companies. Updating and building such industrial supply chains in the United States is critical if the country is to reach the cutting edge of technology and affordability. The floor could look something like what former Biden official Jared Bernstein has laid out: allowing, say, 100,000 Chinese EV imports access to the U.S. market without tariffs for Chinese investments in joint ventures with American firms under specific conditions.

This window of opportunity, however, will not last forever. Chinese firms currently find themselves in a difficult financial position even as their futures look bright. In a few years, further consolidation of the Chinese EV sector will have already happened, and firms won’t be nearly so keen to accept stringent requirements.

Democrats playing up the threat of Chinese cars to make Trump appear “weak” on China—and to flex their hawkish muscles—are playing a mug’s game. Americans may say on surveys that they don’t like China, but when they’re asked to rank what matters most, China almost never comes up. Hyping a China threat only grows the military-industrial complex, and inflexible protectionism, moreover, only ensures the dominance of Chinese firms worldwide.

Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election on affordability, and helping Americans access cheap transportation options could be a winning issue in the future. Tangible solutions like cheap EVs are incredibly rare. Disrupting China hawkery while reducing emissions and improving affordability is an opportunity for a triple political win for those brave enough to get in the driver’s seat.