Keith Bradsher is a longtime
New York Times reporter on China, and I thought
this recent article was interesting and worthwhile to consider. The article's thesis is that China's lead in manufacturing electric vehicles is due to its lead in battery chemistry research:
...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.
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.”
So let's take the easy stuff first - I basically refuse to accept Bradsher's qualitative and quantitative assessment of the battery research field of either the United States or China. I'm genuinely curious as to what battery chemists/researchers think, and Professor Smith seems to agree that the number of graduate student posts is relatively low.* I'm willing to believe that he is correct, but unwilling to take his position without outside analysis.
I tend to think that China's manufacturing edge in batteries has to do with China's manufacturing edge in, I dunno, everything? If you're making most of the laptop batteries in the world (who knows if this is true, but I speculate that it is), you're probably also pretty good at making advanced electric car batteries. Yes, I'm sure that Chinese manufacturers take advantage of a well-educated populace, etc, etc.
I do have to mention that this is a fascinating edge that China has:
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.
The ability of Chinese companies to simply throw bodies at a problem 24 hours a day is something that American and European companies simply cannot match.
*If this were 2012, I would have spent the last 72 hours coming up with a Google Sheets list of American battery chemistry research groups, but alas, I have other hobbies and I need to sleep more.
