by Xinhua writer Zhou Qianxian
BEIJING, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- I recently joined a research trip that traced the arc of China's industrial transformation, from mining regions to manufacturing hubs, and from raw materials to finished goods.
What struck me, again and again, was not just the automation level of factories, but the connections between them. Traditional industries find new flows, emerging industries discover stable upstream supply, and both meet on the same industrial chain that reaches across the globe.
On the road, our car wound through the hills of Fuquan, southwest China's Guizhou Province. Outside the window, gray-white outcrops of phosphate rock occasionally emerged from the rolling hills.
Fuquan's proven phosphate reserves stand at 1.44 billion tonnes, among the largest in Asia. In the past, this rock became fertilizer for crops. Now, it has become the power "heart" of new energy vehicles (NEVs).
The plant of Guizhou Yuneng New Energy Battery Material is located there. Zeng Qingjie, the company's administrative director, told me that the company has built a complete chain from phosphate mining to production of lithium iron phosphate cathode material, the key material inside NEV batteries that stores and releases energy to make a car run.
"Having a whole industrial chain means lower costs, stronger competitiveness, and full quality control at every step," Zeng said, adding that shifting from fertilizer production to battery-grade iron phosphate increases value per tonne by nearly tenfold.
Its parent company, Hunan Yuneng, is among the world's top lithium iron phosphate cathode material suppliers. The key lies in its high-compaction technology, which packs more active material into the same volume, giving batteries higher energy density and longer driving range.
Demand is still soaring. The industry's operating rate hit around 90 percent in July, and Yuneng is racing to expand production.
In Nanning, capital of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, another type of rock shares a similar fate. The bauxite that has long been used in building materials now has a new identity: aluminum foil.
At the plant of the Aluminum-based New Materials Group, rolls of silver battery foil come off the production line. The foil is just 0.012 to 0.015 millimeters thick, about one-tenth the width of a human hair.
Ding Ronghui, the company's technical director, explained that battery foil is far more demanding than food-grade aluminum. Processing fees are more than double, because the foil must be both thin and strong enough to avoid tearing, a challenge the company has solved through "processing softening," precisely controlling the metal's microstructure to maintain strength while improving elongation.
From this plant, the battery foil is shipped just three kilometers down the road to BYD's Nanning battery plant, the largest single-site battery factory the company operates anywhere in the world.
In China, there are many places where multiple links of the industrial chain are brought together, even achieving "next-door supply," with upstream and downstream companies finding each other within the same industrial park.
I asked a local official whether this clustering was the result of planning or market forces. He paused for a moment and said, "The government provides the framework and services, but it's the companies themselves that find their upstream and downstream partners."
"Next-door supply" is no longer just about spatial clustering; it has evolved into a deeply integrated symbiotic relationship between upstream and downstream enterprises, significantly reducing logistics costs and enabling much faster supply chain response, the official added.
For example, a thickness variation spotted at the battery plant can be corrected at the foil mill before the next batch ships, while a purity issue flagged at the cathode line can be traced back to the mine and fixed within days.
Following the downstream end of this industrial chain, I went to BYD's headquarters in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province. In a showroom, the second-generation blade battery sample caught my eye. I picked it up. It felt light, thin and smooth in my hand, nothing like the rough ore that comes from the mountains of southwest China.
It was noted on the battery label that charging from 10 percent to 70 percent at room temperature takes just five minutes, a breakthrough that BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu said will have an impact on this year's NEV sales.
Chinese NEVs are not a story of one company. In the first half of this year, China's NEV sales reached about 7.45 million units, up 7.3 percent year on year, while exports stood at nearly 2.36 million units, soaring 120 percent year on year.
Over the course of this journey, I began to realize that the competitiveness of China's emerging industries does not come from subsidies, but from the combined force of accumulated technological innovation, growing market demand and long-term government policy guidance.
Technological breakthroughs stack on one another, with high-compaction cathodes, aluminum foil thinner than a hair, and a wall of patents at BYD's showroom bearing witness to years of incremental advances. Each improvement creates the conditions for the next, turning ordinary rocks into high-performance materials that their geology did not necessarily promise.
Then there is the way the industry organizes itself. The International Energy Agency reports that battery cell prices in China are over 30 percent lower than in Europe, a gap driven largely by efficiency and automation as well as access to low-cost supplies of critical minerals and battery components. A Rhodium Group study points to similar structural advantages that give Chinese original equipment manufacturers their edge -- deeper vertical integration, greater scale and lower overhead costs.
China's push into NEVs is not only an industrial policy choice. It was written into the country's carbon peaking action plan for the 2026-2030 period, which explicitly calls for continuously strengthening the competitive advantages of new energy, NEVs and power batteries.
The latest signal came just days ago. The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee held a meeting and urged active moves to achieve breakthroughs in frontier technologies and advance the development of future industries, with a focus on building emerging pillar industries and continuously promoting the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries.
As I write this account of my journey, those rocks I saw may already be traveling on roads somewhere in the world. However, they are no longer just rocks. They are sources of power, driving the world toward a cleaner future. Enditem
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