China's tech export play: EVs, open models and a battery roadmap for 2030

In June, the BYD Zhengzhou docked at the Port of Melbourne carrying 5,000 electric vehicles. According to RNZ, which carried the analysis by ABC chief business correspondent Ian Verrender, it was the largest single EV shipment ever to reach Australia. The vehicles arrived on a purpose-built LNG-powered carrier painted in red and white livery.

The shipment is one data point. The sales figures behind it are harder to dismiss.

In the first half of 2026, every major Japanese automaker in Australia except Honda lost ground year on year, RNZ reported. Mazda fell 17 percent, Toyota 21 percent, Subaru and Mitsubishi 25 percent each, and Nissan 32 percent. Over the same period, BYD sales rose 124 percent, Chery 77 percent and Geely 495 percent. RNZ notes all three Chinese brands started from a much smaller base, which inflates the percentage gains, but the direction is clear.

Australia matters here beyond its own market. It has had no domestic car industry for a decade and few trade barriers, so RNZ describes it as a litmus test for global consumer taste. Last month, almost a quarter of all cars sold in Australia were fully electric, against 7 percent a year earlier. Add hybrids, and battery and plug-in cars are now level with petrol and diesel models. Riz Akhtar, founder of the research group carloop, told RNZ he drives a Chinese EV that costs around A$40,000. An equivalent Japanese or European vehicle would be more than 25 percent dearer. "Consumers aren't stupid. They're not going to spend money they don't need to," he said.

Tokyo's retreat, Wolfsburg's cuts

The pressure is not confined to Australia. Toyota vice-chairman Koji Sato told an annual supplier meeting in March that Japanese producers needed to cooperate more closely on production and costs. "Unless things change, we will not survive," he said, according to RNZ. Akhtar's reading is blunter: most Japanese manufacturers are scrambling to deliver EVs, and many of the new models rest on Chinese manufacturers and components, with some simply rebadged Chinese cars.

In Europe, Volkswagen chief Oliver Blume has foreshadowed lay-offs of up to 100,000 workers, RNZ reported, after years in which the company, in that account, dropped the ball on technology. VW's share price has halved since his predecessor was removed four years ago, under pressure from US tariffs and China's advance. The company has responded with asset sales and large new investments in China, where it wants to build cars for the domestic market.

None of this happened by accident. RNZ traces the policy back to 2000 and a cash-and-incentive push in 2009 that drew battery firms such as BYD into carmaking. The goals were to cut China's reliance on imported oil and to cut pollution. Alongside that, China built out refining and production of industrial metals, including lithium, cobalt, manganese and graphite, and now accounts for almost all of the world's anode and cathode output. South Korea bet on the more expensive nickel-magnesium-cobalt chemistry; China chose the cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate route and now accounts for 90 percent of global battery production.

That is the industrial base. The policy layer above it moved again this month.

A five-year plan for batteries

On 28 September, CnEVPost reported, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a battery industry development plan for the fifteenth five-year period, covering 2026 to 2030. The document is dated 14 September and was issued jointly by seven government agencies, including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Transport.

The headline target is initial large-scale use of all-solid-state batteries by 2030. The plan also sets goals for long-life lithium batteries to reach 15,000 charge-discharge cycles and for leading manufacturers to bring product defect rates down to parts-per-billion level. On sodium batteries, it stresses cost, safety and resource availability, and calls for cold-resistant, high-energy-density cells for vehicles and long-cycle storage cells.

Specific measures listed by CnEVPost include improving interfacial contact, extending cycle life, pressure-system engineering and scaling production of high-performance solid electrolytes, plus combining high-voltage cathodes with lithium-metal anodes and anode-free designs. The plan supports corporate mergers and restructuring, faster domestic exploration of lithium and cobalt, used-battery collection systems tied to sales volumes, and a digital identity system for EV power batteries, with exploration of internationally accepted battery passports and mutual recognition of carbon footprint data.

It builds on a September 11 automotive plan for intelligent connected new energy vehicles, which targets a 70 percent share for NEVs in domestic new passenger vehicle sales by 2030. CnEVPost also notes that CATL's chairman has said solid-state batteries must clear three main hurdles before mass production, a reminder that the 2030 goal is a policy target, not a shipping date.

Free models, contested rules

The software side of China's export story is messier, and it is splitting Washington.

MIT Technology Review reported on 20 July that David Sacks, until March the president's AI and crypto czar, called Anthropic's models "lobotomized" and "woke", while Pentagon official Emil Michael called OpenAI's new head of strategic futures a "supreme village idiot". The trigger was Kimi, a free open-source model from Chinese company Moonshot, which MIT Technology Review said appears to rival models from OpenAI and Anthropic that are very much not free. Sacks argued that top AI companies "want the government to eliminate their open source competition", and that Chinese models spread because they come with fewer restrictions on use, a point the newsletter qualified by noting their built-in state censorship. Carnegie fellow Anton Leicht wrote on X that the models are "a threat for an administration that really doesn't want more economic bad news", and MIT Technology Review said they have already rattled US stocks.

The Guardian reported on 1 August that the divide runs through both the White House and the industry. Chipmakers and companies worried about OpenAI's and Anthropic's dominance see opportunity; OpenAI and Anthropic argue Chinese models pose security risks. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US could sanction Chinese AI firms over alleged intellectual property theft, while commerce secretary Howard Lutnick received letters from startup founders asking him not to cut off access to open models. Microsoft, Nvidia, Palantir and Meta signed a letter urging lawmakers to avoid restrictions, and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang lobbied on Capitol Hill. The same week, the FCC banned humanoid robots from China, and a report that China had begun mass production of specialty AI chips helped erase $1tn in market value from other chipmakers, according to the Guardian.

Beijing's own approach to open source is documented in The Conversation, which notes that Chinese AI models such as Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM are generally open-weight rather than open-source: the model and its final parameters are published, but not the training data or methodology. It also flags licensing quirks. Moonshot's Kimi K3 licence requires licensees above certain revenue or user thresholds to "prominently" display the model name, and MiniMax M3's community licence lists uses prohibited by "applicable laws or regulations" without saying which jurisdictions apply. Bilingual licences developed under Chinese government guidance, including the Mulan Permissive Software License 2.0 and the OpenAtom Model License 1.0, give the Chinese text precedence where interpretations conflict.

Hardware exports face a harder test. In Brooklyn federal court on 10 September, a US Justice Department attorney, Taylor Stout, opened the government's case against Huawei with the words "Theft, lies, cover-up", accusing the company of conspiring to steal trade secrets from five US firms, including router source code from Cisco and a phone-testing robotic arm from T-Mobile. Defense lawyer Brian Heberlig told jurors: "It's about competition, not conspiracy. Innovation, not theft." He described the Cisco and T-Mobile incidents as actions by individual employees that management tried to fix. China's foreign ministry said the government "firmly opposes the US side's suppression and containment of Chinese enterprises". The trial is expected to last three months; charges against CFO Meng Wanzhou were dismissed in 2022 under a deferred prosecution agreement, but admissions she made are set to be introduced as evidence.

Put the pieces together and the export question looks less like a single trade fight than a stack of them: cars sold on price and software, batteries governed by a five-year plan, and AI models that are free to download and hard to regulate. Each one lands in a different bureaucracy, and each one is moving at a different speed.