China’s position as the world’s largest battery producer, consumer and innovator is unlikely to change in the near term, and Beijing’s new export controls on battery technology will only entrench it, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report released on Tuesday.

The compendium, written by eight Carnegie researchers, weighs a decade of industrial policy in the seven most important battery-producing economies: China, South Korea, Japan, the European Union and some of its member states, the United States, Canada and India. Some governments bet on national champions, others on joint ventures. A few drove breakthrough technology now nearing the commercial market, while others, the authors write, spent their money on misguided policy.

The hardest arithmetic belongs to Beijing’s rivals. Over two decades of policy support, China has constructed the world’s most vertically integrated battery ecosystem, with overwhelming shares of cell production, of the active materials that go into cells and, increasingly, of next-generation chemistry commercialization. The 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026 to 2030, will increase state support further, with the political priority shifting toward solid-state batteries while production of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, cells enters a more market-driven phase. A political campaign against “involution,” Beijing’s term for destructive price wars, has begun trimming low-end overcapacity, but the authors expect nothing that will dislodge China’s central role.

The report traces that system from the top. Strategic direction comes from the State Council, whose support for batteries and so-called new energy vehicles has been consistent since the late 2000s, and the National Development and Reform Commission coordinates implementation among ministries; its local counterparts are “important power brokers” in their own right. The growth spurt of the 2010s was driven principally by incentives for electric vehicles, starting with the Ten Cities, Thousand Vehicles pilot program in 2009, which expanded from 13 cities in 2010 to almost 100 by 2015.

On the international front, a new era of export controls on high-tech manufacturing equipment and high-energy-density batteries signals that Beijing is tightening its hold on advanced technology leaving the country. That constrains the overseas ambitions of Chinese battery makers and cuts OECD countries off from China’s most capable products, the report says — producing what the authors call “hyper-dominance” in incumbent chemistries.

The findings land as Western companies keep paying for Chinese know-how. Volkswagen recently struck a €3.22 billion arrangement with its Chinese battery partner to make cheap LFP cells in Europe rather than import them. Efforts to go around China, such as a German recycler’s water-based process for recovering lithium from old batteries, remain small next to Asia’s command of the trade.

Elsewhere the verdicts diverge. South Korea, a former battery-technology leader alongside Japan, shifted aggressively toward securing market access abroad, while Japan’s muddled technology policy let its firms fall behind. Of the two big Western markets without incumbent champions, the United States may prove the more successful, the authors argue, thanks to an aggressive subsidy regime, a deep innovation ecosystem and an openness to joint ventures, while the European Union’s demand-side, regulation-led approach produced mixed results. Canada and India, where onshoring has proved harder, are “horizon markets to watch.”

The compendium is the second in a series produced with the New Energy Industrial Strategy Center, after a first report, Battery Geopolitics, on the technology and its future path. Its parting assessment of the race is short: China, the authors write, is “already moving faster to claim advanced technology like sodium-ion and solid-state.”