How EV batteries are becoming the next voltage for China and the United States

2. China used its “unreliable entity list” for the first time ever to sanction Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for selling weapons to Taiwan. The move is believed to be a response to the US blacklisting six Chinese entities for the ‘spy balloon’ drama in January. (CNN)

3. While the official number of victims of the latest wave of covid infections in China is 83,150, estimates by epidemiology experts are much higher, ranging from 970,000 to 1.6 million. (New York Times $)

4. This is not the right time for followers of the Chinese metaverse. ByteDance and Tencent announced layoffs last week in their virtual reality teams. (Global Yicai)

5. The return of the DiDi app to China shows the delicate balance between the government’s goals of containing Big Tech and fostering economic growth. (Wired $)

6. ASML, the Dutch lithography machinery company, has accused a former China-based employee of stealing confidential information in the past two months. ($Bloomberg)

7. Bao Fan, a Chinese billionaire banker who brokered some of the largest acquisitions in China’s tech industry, has disappeared without explanation. (BBC)

lost in translation

Building a charging infrastructure capable of serving the growing number of electric vehicles in China has become a tricky issue. As Chinese publication Time Weekly reported, during the Lunar New Year period, Chinese owners of electric vehicles on road trips had to wait at highway gas stations for hours before they could charge their cars. The same thing happened last summer when an extreme heat wave disabled the grid in parts of China.

Currently, for every public charging station in China, there are more than 12 EV owners who cannot charge at home in their densely populated urban neighborhoods. The lack of public infrastructure has pushed some owners to rent their private charging stations, as these stations are not used 90% of the time. Profits from renting them, which can reach more than 2,000 RMB ($290) every year, help pay for installation costs. But so far, most private charging station owners have yet to realize that sharing is a possibility: only an estimated 2.1% are shared with other EV owners.

One more thing

As Ford announced its plan to manufacture batteries with CATL, Quartz reporter Mary Hui noticed a fascinating historical parallel. In 2023, this agreement allows the Chinese battery giant to finally break into the American market, while American-Chinese relations are shaken by scandals around a Chinese spy balloon. In 2001, a deal between Ford and a Chinese automaker helped the American auto giant break into the Chinese market, while the relationship between the two countries was… interrupted by the scandal surrounding an American spy plane. Chance? I do not think so.