Battery Statecraft: Green Tech Minerals are a Military Asset
Executive Summary:
- Beijing sees its battery dominance as an emerging instrument of statecraft. By controlling key stages of the value chain, it can impose delay, uncertainty, and selective denial costs on foreign clean-tech and defense-adjacent industries.
- Beijing frames “new energy” supply chains as strategic infrastructure, linking industrial policy to economic security and national defense mobilization. This approach treats exports as leverage and domestic capacity as a hedge against sanctions, embargoes, and wartime disruption.
- The most consequential chokepoints are upstream and midstream inputs such as graphite processing, cathode and electrolyte materials, specialized equipment, and select high-performance chemistries where domestic scale and integration can outmatch alternative suppliers even when cell assembly is diversified.
- For the United States and allies, the core vulnerability is not finished-cell shortages but dependence on Chinese-controlled processing and materials that shape cost, availability, and timelines for electric vehicles, grid storage, and clean-tech manufacturing, especially during trade disputes.
On the edge of a small German town, a Chinese-owned battery plant turns stacks of graphite-coated anodes and lithium-rich cathodes into cells bound for European electric vehicles (EVs) (Xinhua, July 23, 2025). The Chinese-processed lithium, graphite, and other inputs are powering the EV industry while also powering the motors, guidance electronics, and energy stores for future missiles, radars, and unmanned systems. In 2023, exports from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) of “new three” (新三样) products (EVs, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells) passed $150 billion, up nearly 30 percent year on year. Chinese factories produced roughly 70 percent of global output of lithium-ion batteries (Xinhua, January 12, 2024; U.S. International Trade Commission, June 2024). The PRC maintains not only pricing power in civilian markets but also a growing edge in the power systems, logistics backbone, and coercive leverage that underpin its next generation of military strength (PLA Daily, August 23, 2024; Sina Finance, October 10, 2025).
Emerging Battery Empire as a ‘New-Quality Productive Force’
Beijing now treats its domestic battery complex as a strategic asset, not just an export engine. Power and storage installations across vehicles and new energy projects climbed past 435 GWh in 2023, and firms like CATL and BYD now sit at the top of global rankings. The PRC increasingly controls the midstream where cathodes, anodes, cells, and battery packs are designed and built at scale (The Beijing News, February 29, 2024). The National Energy Administration’s 2025 storage report adds that the PRC holds more than 40 percent of global new-type energy-storage capacity, of which lithium batteries make up over 96 percent. This ties grid storage directly back to the same lithium and materials base that feeds EVs (National Energy Administration, July 31, 2025).
Chinese leaders frame this battery complex as a prime example of “new-quality productive forces” (新质生产力), their label for advanced, innovation-driven industries (Chinese Academy of Sciences, March 5, 2024; China Brief, June 30, 2025). Work reports and People’s Daily articles cast new energy vehicles and power batteries as pillars of a modern industrial system, and General Secretary Xi Jinping has called on Jiangsu Province to become an “important front” (重要阵地) for these new forces, prompting provincial planners to put EVs and battery materials at the center of dense, AI-enabled energy and manufacturing clusters (National Development and Reform Commission, March 20, 2024; People’s Daily, June 14, 2024, October 21, 2025).
These new-quality productive forces rest on a few midstream inputs that the PRC nearly monopolizes. Chinese industry figures estimate that in 2024 Chinese plants supplied roughly 96 percent of global anode shipments and in early 2025 accounted for more than 98 percent of global production of lithium-battery anode materials (Sohu, January 24, 2025; Shanshan Technology, April 22, 2025). Government and industry reports suggest a similar story for cathode materials (Sina Finance, February 27, 2025; ITDCW, January 20, 2025). Most EV and storage cells still depend on graphite anodes, lithium salts, and cathode powders that come out of Chinese factories, which gives Beijing leverage at the material level before a single pack reaches a vehicle or weapon.
Beijing is now locking its midstream leverage into law. Under the 2020 Export Control Law and a 2024 Dual-Use Items Export Control Regulation, high-risk exports pass through a national dual-use licensing system run by the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; an October 2025 MOFCOM–Customs Announcement No. 58 adds high-energy lithium-ion cells, key cell-production equipment and synthetic-graphite anode processes to a controlled list (MOFCOM, accessed December 19, 2024, October 9, 2025; China Brief, May 23, 2025, October 17, 2025). These build on the same licensing and end-use checks already applied to rare earths to ration supply to specific users (Defense One, July 9, 2025). The result is a framework that lets Beijing transform its dominance in battery and graphite inputs into a targeted tool of “battery statecraft,” including against foreign defense supply chains.
From Civilian Battery Scale to Military Power Systems
Chinese battery scale is already bleeding directly into military platforms. An assessment by Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) notes that lithium iron phosphate batteries are now widely used in green energy storage and unmanned vehicles and argues that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sees them as a safer, longer-life replacement for legacy lead-acid systems in many roles (INDSR, April 2022). In parallel, the 14th Five-Year Plan on Modern Logistics instructs civilian agencies to replace diesel trucks, forklifts, and depot equipment with new-energy models. This creates a domestic base of electric assets that double as a ready template for electric fuel convoys, autonomous supply vehicles, and battery-backed depots that can be mobilized or mirrored in wartime (MOFCOM, May 17, 2022).
On the PRC’s frontiers, the PLA is already wiring this battery ecosystem into border defense. A joint program between the National Energy Administration and the Central Military Commission (CMC) has connected hundreds of high-altitude and island outposts to the national grid or local microgrids, with Chinese reporting claiming more than 700 posts now rely on mixes of grid power, solar, wind, and batteries instead of fuel convoys alone (Global Times, January 14, 2024; Sina Finance, January 19, 2025). The NEA’s 2025 new-type storage report names lithium batteries, especially stable long-life lithium iron phosphate units, as the core of these systems, while Chinese firms field extreme-temperature military packs to keep radars, communications nodes, and maneuver units operating in plateau and polar conditions (Liwei Battery, accessed December 19, 2025).
Chinese defense journals show that lithium-based power has moved beyond logistics into front-line systems. Recent articles report that lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries now power most unmanned underwater vehicles, torpedoes, conventional submarines, and deep-diving vehicles, highlight energy density and safety under high-pressure seawater as key design challenges, and note that platforms such as the “Wenhai-1” ARV use lithium iron phosphate packs to sustain 24-hour missions (Ren et al., January 8, 2023; Liu Huimin, October 14, 2025; Liu Hao et al., November 15, 2025). [1] Together, they show that the same chemistries that dominate EV and grid storage are being engineered into long-endurance undersea platforms for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), mine warfare, and anti-ship operations.
PLA theorists treat “new energy” (新能源) as a core ingredient of “new-quality combat power” (新质战斗力) (China Brief, December 21, 2025). A CMC discussion of a “new military energy support system” (军事能源保障新格局) calls for accelerated use of solar, wind, ocean energy, hydrogen, and advanced storage in weapons, new-type forces, and key facilities to break wartime energy bottlenecks (Ministry of National Defense, June 6, 2022; National University of Defense Technology, March 25, 2024). INDSR reporting on the PLAN’s latest conventional submarines points to lithium batteries as a way to increase underwater speed and endurance, cut acoustic signatures, and ease maintenance, with boats like the Type 039C framed as testbeds for wider fleet adoption (INDSR, February 22, 2022). This shows how abundant cheap batteries and maturing storage technologies let the PLA design electric logistics fleets, hardened base microgrids, distributed sensor networks, and drone swarms as parts of a single energy web, which is how a civilian glut of EV packs starts to translate into endurance advantages on the battlefield.
Conclusion: EV Policy as Power Projection
Beijing sells its EV and battery push as a climate service, while state media use complaints about “overcapacity” (产能过剩) to argue that U.S. and EU trade measures are protectionist and that the world needs Chinese EVs, batteries, and solar gear to hit green targets at reasonable cost (People’s Daily Online, May 28, 2024; China Brief, November 1, 2024). That narrative frames the PRC’s dominance in new-energy supply chains into both a shield against Western pressure and a rebuttal to “containment,” since any sharp cut in Chinese exports would hit foreign economies and energy transitions long before it constrained the PLA (People’s Daily, April 26, 2025). At the same time, Western studies warn that cheap Chinese clean-tech goods are deepening this imbalance by flooding markets and undercutting local producers, slowing efforts by allies to build alternative capacity (Centre for European Reform, December 9, 2025).
Beijing’s export control architecture weaponizes external dependence to create a tool that can dial up in a crisis. MOFCOM is empowered to slow or deny permits to chosen firms for key technologies and materials. It has already extended similar controls to rare earths, magnets, battery items, and some exports to U.S. defense contractors, raising costs in peacetime and threatening delays for the high-performance batteries that allied forces need in a contingency. Policies branded as EV or green-industrial strategy therefore also shape the energy depth of future battlefields, making “battery statecraft” another channel for Beijing to turn its civilian build-out into power projection.
Notes
[1] Ren Zhong [任翀], Li Nan [李楠], and Du Zhaopeng [杜照鹏]. “Current Status and Development Trends of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles” [大深度无人潜航器研究现状及发展趋势]. Digital Ocean & Underwater Warfare [数字海洋与水下攻防]. 2023, 6(1): 63–71.
Liu Huimin [刘慧敏], Shan Rui [单瑞], Li Yuhua [李玉华], et al. “Status and prospect of navigation technology development for deep-sea autonomous/remotely-operated hybrid underwater vehicle” [自主 遥控混合式水下机器人导航技术发展现状分析]. Marine Geology Frontiers [海洋地质前沿]. 2025, 41(11): 15–28.
Liu Hao [刘浩], Song Deyong [宋德勇], Hu Zhen [胡震], Zhan Jianfeng [占剑锋]. “Application status and development trend of lithium-ion battery in underwater equipment” [锂离子电池在水下装备的应用现状及发展趋势]. Ship Science and Technology [舰船科学技术], 2025, 47(15): 1–5.
