In the not-so-distant future,
the world is going to be a very different place.
China is becoming the world's biggest economy.
We would expect China to overtake the United States
pretty quickly, perhaps around
the turn of the decade in 2030.
Its share of global trade actually increased
at a record clip.
China's meteoric economic rise
is unprecedented in history.
There's something called China time,
where everything happens so much faster.
The reality of the last 40 years
has been a radical shift from agrarian poverty
at the end of the Mao era
to something which looks like
a comfortable, middle class life.
Opening up to market capitalism in the late 70's
kick-started a new era.
The trappings of Western capitalism
are now ubiquitous in China,
but so too is the iron fist of the state.
While it undoubtedly comes at a cost,
this central control has allowed Beijing
to nurture long-term economic strategies.
China has transformed itself into
a green energy powerhouse that produces
most of the world's solar panels, wind turbines
and lithium-ion batteries.
By 2030, China is poised to grab
the lion's share of jobs and wealth
as the world gradually transitions away from fossil fuels
and it's become fertile ground for electric car makers.
At GM, we believe China will be
one of the main epicenters in the globe
of the adoption or the transformation
towards the electrification of the vehicle.
China is rewriting the rules of global capitalism.
Can the rest of the world keep up?
You know, the President is concerned
that China is far ahead of us.
It is time for that to shift around.
While China has become a leader
in multiple green industries,
the progress it has made in electric vehicles
or EVs is unparalleled.
The evolution of the automobile in the 20th century
caused an economic revolution in the United States.
After losing out to international carmakers for decades,
China has learned to leapfrog the combustion engine.
The country is already home to the planet's
largest market for EVs by sales,
and it still has room to grow.
Electric cars account for 5% of sales today,
but Beijing is aiming for that figure to hit 40% by 2030.
Back in 2001, Beijing drew up the 863 initiative
to strengthen the competitiveness of China
in the global economy.
It invested a relatively small amount,
about $130 million into three
new energy vehicle technologies,
fuel cell, hybrid and electric.
These guided China's green vehicle development
for the next 15 years.
There is a technology race on renewable energy
and electric cars that's emerging
between the United States and China.
Right now, China is ahead on electric cars
because the government has had a very strong policy
supporting electric cars now for a number of years.
I've been going to China for about 25 years
and the changes are just amazing.
When I first went to China, the streets were filled
with swarms, swarms and swarms of bicyclists,
almost in this graceful swimming thing
as people were bicycling to work.
All gone, just streets now jammed
and you can sit there in the longest traffic jams
I've ever been in and that's just one
sign of the change.
They realize that there's one global market
where they cannot be competitive.
They're too late, the traditional
gasoline, petrol-powered car,
but they see themselves, if they can get
at the forefront on electric vehicles
and almost half the world's electric cars
now are in China, that will give them
a foundation to be very strong competitors
in the global automobile market of the future,
which they are not now.
This technological leapfrogging means
many of us haven't seen or even heard of
some of China's biggest automakers.
Like so many other Chinese companies,
Geely had grown into a behemoth
long before it started to operate abroad.
Now, it owns Volvo, has a stake in Daimler,
and is listed internationally.
Geely isn't selling as many cars as Tesla just yet,
but it is able to launch bold new concepts
in an environment that actively encourages innovation,
such as its new rapid battery-swap stations.
This is a technology Tesla didn't think
Western countries were ready for.
It's amazing, if you go back two decades,
China was a tiny automobile market,
one or two million cars a year.
Now it's like 27 million cars a year,
which is like 50% bigger than the U.S. market.
So, that gives them a test bed
for promoting electric cars,
which they're doing aggressively.
It also means that the automobile makers of the world,
and remember, the automobile business
is a global business, they may be
focused on the United States, but they also
wanna sell electric cars and be competitive in China.
China's vast domestic market,
400 million middle-class car buyers
means that major international carmakers
have to invest and compete there.
Beijing may be able to take advantage of that
to further its strategic ambition
of clean-tech dominance,
but that's not to say it's a hard sell
for foreign car companies.
The city of Liuzhou, thanks to a green push
by local authorities has effectively become
the capital of the biggest EV market in the world.
They basically have created lanes in the city
where electric cars can go,
and, like, normal combustion engines can't.
And the majority of these electric cars
are three meters long, cost less than $5,000,
and out-sell Teslas.
They've created dedicated parking spaces
that are half the size of normal parking spaces
that can only be used by those.
So, you've created an environment where
it's an advantage in that city
to have a Hong Guang mini EV.
So, it's a positive example of how to
encourage usage of products
that helps drive consumer behavior.
The cars are made by a Chinese company called Wuling
in partnership with a
very famous American company, General Motors.
♪ Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet ♪
♪ They go together in the good old USA ♪
♪ Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet ♪
Once a symbol of American industrial might,
General Motors has to now look
outside the U.S. for opportunity.
China has become the company's biggest market
and is, by far, the most strategically important.
The Chinese consumer is very tech savvy.
This means you've got a very fertile ground
to try new things, to experiment
and to get people to adopt new technology.
Every car we make we sell,
and this is not regulation-driven,
this is pure customer demand
that is driving the need for us
to supply that product to consumers.
In China, electric car buyers can get subsidies
worth thousands of dollars.
In some cities, getting a parking permit
for a conventional combustion engine car
has become nearly impossible.
At the end of 2020, the country had
1.68 million charging points for EVs.
Compare that with 72,000 in the U.S. at the end of 2019.
The vast majority of Chinese driving habits
and actual miles driven or kilometers driven
is in an urban environment, which obviously
suits the adoption of electric vehicles.
If you look at the Hong Guang Mini EV,
we have ranges of 170 kilometers and 120 kilometers,
but for the vast majority of our consumers that,
it's either a second car or it's a primary car
in a real downtown area, that's adequate
because of driving conditions
and the charging infrastructure mean
that you've got a very high adoption rate
and not so many barriers to adoption.
There's a clear tipping point
around the 250, 300 mile mark in the U.S.
That is because a lot of consumers in the U.S.
drive, you know, city to city.
So that's a big part of life.
That's a little different in China.
85% of miles driven are driven in a non-highway environment.
The Chinese aren't just transforming the EV market.
A government-led, top-down approach
also rewrites the rules of innovation.
In the Western conception, the entrepreneur
is critical in the innovation process.
It's the entrepreneur, the Bill Gates,
the Jeff Bezos, and the financial incentive
that innovation will deliver enormous wealth
that's the catalyst for the innovation process.
That's part of the picture,
but as we're discovering in China,
it's not the entire picture.
A government which is willing to patiently
pour resources, time, money, people
into solving problems and pushing innovation forward
can also deliver some impressive results.
The majority of the cars GM sells in China
are made in China, which means the company
has to walk on eggshells to stay in Beijing's good graces.
It represents the dilemma most foreign companies
face in the country.
To catch up in clean-tech, there's a trade-off...
My name is Joe Biden and I'm a car guy.
Which is why investment in EV charging stations
is part of President Biden's new
$1.2 trillion infrastructure plan.
You know, the President is concerned
that China is far ahead of us
in the electric vehicle market,
and instead of producing the technologies of the future,
we are importing them from somewhere else.
It is time for that to shift around.
Not everyone on Biden's team is alarmed though.
I would venture to guess that the vast majority
of all patents and innovations
in the clean tech space has been funded
by the Department of Energy and by
private sector players within the United States.
They were commercialized largely, I would say,
in Europe through the Feed-in Tariff programs
and in China, through their manufacturing prowess,
but a lot of the technology really originated
here in the United States
but I think if you were to think about
what the most innovative electric vehicles are
in the world, you'd think of Tesla,
and I think when you think about
who all of the players, including the Chinese players,
want to emulate, it's American innovation.
It's not Chinese innovation.
The current lithium-ion battery technology,
really no one believes that that current technology
will be relevant in 2030.
Whether it's the cathode or the anode
or the electrolyte or the substrates,
I think everyone sees a dramatic amount of innovation
in the next generation of battery storage,
which is what we're scaling up here in the United States.
There are facets to China's success in clean tech
that are problematic to say the least.
Its booming solar industry has been accused
of relying, to some degree, on forced labor.
Where systemic oppression of Muslim Uyghurs
is an international human rights issue.
Justice! Give us our justice!
China is also the world's biggest
greenhouse gas emitter, and is home
to huge environmental problems,
mainly thanks to its reluctance to rein in
its massive coal industry.
When severe air pollution swept across the country
in the winter of 2013, Beijing tilted further
towards green car policies.
Over the past 30 days, the average
air quality level in this city
has registered as hazardous on the official scale.
By 2019, the government had designed
a world-beating system of regulatory targets
which has required automakers
to accelerate investment in sales
of electric cars faster than they might have
left to their own devices.
All this has set China on course for 2030,
where the country will have an out-sized influence
in this strategic industry, with a big say
over technical standards and terms of trade.
The big question, the Chinese,
state-sponsored conception of capitalism
worked really well when China was catching up,
borrowing from, or some would say,
stealing technologies from the rest of the world.
Will it work so well when China has reached
the technology frontier and needs
to innovate through it?
I think you could have two scenarios.
One is, it actually doesn't look too different,
a lot more electric cars on the road,
traffic still a really big problem.
The other is, what I describe in 'The New Map'
as auto tech, where you take electric cars,
put it together with ride-hailing,
put it together with self-driving, autonomous vehicles,
and you have these very large fleets of cars,
self-driving, that just come
and pick people up and people don't really
identify with their car anymore.
It's just a utility of facility,
and it's kind of moving in a very different way,
and you don't have traffic jams
because everybody is well coordinated.
So, it's all these vehicles are
tied together by software.
So, I think it's not a prediction of one or the other,
but rather two scenarios.
A lot depends upon the pace of technology,
and I think a lot depends upon
how this competition and interdependence at the same time
between China and the United States plays out.
Cutting edge EVs rely on a lot of software
and data for onboard navigation, charging,
wireless updates, and remote diagnostics.
That's a sensitive area,
given efforts in the U.S. and Europe
to restrain tech transfers to China,
and could damage development if not handled carefully.
As China continues to grow and lead this industry,
it will almost certainly have
a bigger say in the outcome for everyone else.