By DCB Editorial, March 11, 2025
Wang Chuanfu, the architect and CEO of China’s ascendant EV empire, BYD, occupied a prime seat at Monday’s gathering with President Xi Jinping—a meticulously staged tableau meant to signal Beijing’s renewed embrace of its tech sector.
BYD’s rise has been nothing short of relentless. It has unseated foreign competitors, seized new markets abroad, and now challenges Tesla for global EV dominance. China’s electric vehicles, pouring into Latin America and Southeast Asia, owe their rapid expansion to a stark reality: they are cheaper. Japanese, South Korean, and European automakers, long accustomed to their dominance, find themselves undercut by a machine that fuses state largesse with industrial precision.
Wang, fresh from his audience with Xi, declared in a state television interview that Chinese EVs are three to five years ahead of their foreign counterparts. He extolled the company’s “talent” as its greatest asset, invoking the labour of 110,000 engineers whose efforts underpin BYD’s technological edge.
That BYD and its Chinese rivals have shattered the automotive status quo is beyond dispute. Foreign analysts, once dismissive of China’s ability to match the technological sophistication of Tesla or Volkswagen, now marvel at how quickly the gap has closed. Wang, for his part, cloaked China’s ambitions in the language of inclusion, proclaiming that “openness” would allow the world to partake in the country’s automotive revolution.
The reality, however, is far more brutal. China’s wager on EVs began over a decade ago, with the state investing billions into manufacturers and consumers alike, a campaign of industrial Darwinism that birthed a swarm of competing firms. The weak perished. The strong adapted. And as Beijing began withdrawing subsidies, only the most ruthless innovators survived.
The West, quick to cry foul, has responded with tariffs and accusations of market distortion. European officials decry “artificially low” prices propped up by state subsidies, even as they fail to acknowledge their own long history of economic protectionism.
Yet beneath the rhetoric lies an unavoidable truth: China’s EVs have exposed the complacency of foreign automakers, their bloated costs, and their reliance on a system in which they were meant to always lead. Now, they scramble to catch up.
Meanwhile, China pushes forward, refining its battery technology, mastering supply chains, and tightening its grip on the future of transportation. The global auto industry is undergoing a reckoning. And, for the first time in a century, the West is no longer in the driver’s seat.
