How China Built Tech Prowess: Chemistry Classes and Research Labs

China’s domination of electric cars, which is threatening to start a trade war, was born decades ago in university laboratories in Texas, when researchers discovered how to make batteries with minerals that were abundant and cheap.

Companies from China have recently built on those early discoveries, figuring out how to make the batteries hold a powerful charge and endure more than a decade of daily recharges. They are inexpensively and reliably manufacturing vast numbers of these batteries, producing most of the world’s electric cars and many other clean energy systems.

Batteries are just one example of how China is catching up with — or passing — advanced industrial democracies in its technological and manufacturing sophistication. It is achieving many breakthroughs in a long list of sectors, from pharmaceuticals to drones to high-efficiency solar panels.

Beijing’s challenge to the technological leadership that the United States has held since World War II is evidenced in China’s classrooms and corporate budgets, as well as in directives from the highest levels of the Communist Party.

A considerably larger share of Chinese students major in science, math and engineering than students in other big countries do. That share is rising further, even as overall higher education enrollment has increased more than tenfold since 2000.

Spending on research and development has surged, tripling in the past decade and moving China into second place after the United States. Researchers in China lead the world in publishing widely cited papers in 52 of 64 critical technologies, recent calculations by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveal.