China's tech policy push: cheap EVs, open-source AI and the export fightback

China's technology policy is no longer just an industrial plan. It is now the thing US regulators, European carmakers and Australian consumers are reacting to.

In June, a purpose-built LNG-powered bulk carrier, the BYD Zhengzhou, docked at the Port of Melbourne carrying 5,000 newly built electric vehicles. Ian Verrender, chief business correspondent at ABC News, writing for RNZ, called it the largest single EV shipment ever sent to Australia. That shipment landed in a market with no domestic car industry and few trade barriers. Verrender describes it as an international litmus test for the auto industry.

Chinese brands have moved fast. In the first half of this year, BYD sales rose 124 percent, Chery 77 percent and Geely 495 percent, while Toyota fell 21 percent, Mazda 17 percent and Nissan 32 percent. All the Chinese gains came off a much smaller base, which exaggerates the percentages. The direction is hard to argue with.

Last month almost a quarter of cars sold in Australia were fully electric, up from 7 percent a year earlier, per the same account.

The policy behind those numbers was set long before the ships arrived. China began pushing battery firms such as BYD into automobiles as far back as 2000, poured cash and incentives into the project in 2009, and set out to cut its reliance on imported oil while cleaning up its cities. It also moved to dominate refining and production of lithium, cobalt, manganese and graphite, and now accounts for 90 percent of the world's battery production, according to Verrender. South Korea picked the more expensive nickel-magnesium-cobalt chemistry; China chose cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate. Toyota vice-chairman Koji Sato told an annual supplier meeting in March: "Unless things change, we will not survive."

Software is the next front. Writing in The Conversation, a China expert and open-source researcher argues that Beijing has folded open-source development into its national technology strategy, and that the countries which lead the technical and legal standards will hold an edge for decades. Chinese firms have used open licences as a workaround for sanctions and export controls. After the US blacklisted Huawei, Google cut off its licensed Android services. Huawei kept building on Android's open-source code, then shipped HarmonyOS NEXT and an open-source version called OpenHarmony. The state-guided OpenAtom Foundation and Gitee, a domestic alternative to GitHub, now support that stack, alongside openKylin and openEuler.

The AI fight is sharper still. Major Chinese models including Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM are generally open-weight rather than fully open-source, meaning the parameters are published but not the training data or method. Moonshot's Kimi K3 licence requires large licensees to display the model name prominently, and MiniMax M3's community licence prohibits uses banned by "applicable laws or regulations", leaving open which jurisdiction applies. Bilingual licences such as Mulan PSL v2 and the OpenAtom Model License say the Chinese text prevails in disputes.

MIT Technology Review reported on 20 July that Kimi's release split President Donald Trump's AI advisers into open argument. David Sacks, until March the president's AI and crypto czar, called Anthropic's models "lobotomized" and "woke", and criticised AI companies that "want the government to eliminate their open source competition". Pentagon official Emil Michael called OpenAI's new head of strategic futures a "supreme village idiot" after former Trump adviser Dean Ball described a White House model-vetting process as a "de facto licensing regime for frontier AI".

Beijing has answered the export-control pressure in court and in ministerial statements. The Guardian reported on 10 September that the US trial of Huawei opened in Brooklyn federal court. There, Justice Department attorney Taylor Stout told jurors: "Theft, lies, cover-up. For 20 years, that's how Huawei, a massive Chinese telecommunications company, victimized American companies and abused the American financial system." Defence lawyer Brian Heberlig countered that the case is "about competition, not conspiracy. Innovation, not theft." A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said the government "firmly opposes the US side's suppression and containment of Chinese enterprises".

Batteries show how hard the untangling will be. MIT Technology Review reported on 10 September that a late-August executive order declared a national emergency and effectively bans Chinese batteries from grid-scale storage. Import taxes on batteries rose to 25 percent in January from 7.5 percent, and from 2026, 55 percent of material costs for new storage projects must come from outside China and other restricted countries to qualify for tax credits. Analyst Shan Tomouk of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence called the outright ban "a bit of a surprise", and BloombergNEF's Isshu Kikuma said projects could be delayed or, "worst case", cancelled. US-made cells remain significantly more expensive than Chinese ones, and domestic supply may not meet demand until later in the 2030s.