In February, Ford "announced plans to open a new $3.5 billion L.F.P. battery factory in Michigan. It would license the technology from a Chinese battery maker, whose engineers would — in the words of Bill Ford, the automaker’s chairman — “help us
get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves.” It seemed like a win-win: The Chinese company, CATL, would get cash and prestige; Ford would learn how to make these batteries; and America would get 2,500 new manufacturing jobs. This
was, apparently, exactly the kind of situation that Biden’s climate law was meant to set up.
Yet Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who helped shape the law, exploded at the news. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to give them $900 out of $7,500, to let it go to China for basically a product we started,” he told an energy
conference in Houston. (He was referring to the subsidy that the law grants to buyers of new electric vehicles, though Ford says none of that federal money would go to the Chinese company.)
“You’re telling me we don’t have the smart people and the technology, and we can’t get up to speed quick enough?” he asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Republicans, too, blanched at the partnership. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, who had once angled to win the factory for his state, abruptly withdrew his proposal and lambasted the project as a “Trojan horse relationship with the Chinese Communist
Party.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida demanded that the Treasury Department evaluate the deal as a national-security risk.
But for all the overheated rhetoric, the truth is that free-flowing, in-person collaboration has been the fundamental mode of how technology moves across borders. With few exceptions, you either let yourself learn from your competitors, or you fail to
compete with them at all.
Other countries understand this. It is the United States that has had to learn this lesson again and again."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/opinion/america-china-clean-energy.html
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