China’s Sneak Attack on the Battery American Taxpayers Paid For

By Peter Navarro | The National Interest | October 5, 2025

Technology that is developed with US taxpayer money should be manufactured in America, not China.

“We are an American company with a Chinese footprint.” So says Henning Rath, the German chief executive of EnerVenue, which started production at its first battery factory the same September that President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. Rath said the date was a coincidence.

EnerVenue is not just another battery company. Its battery is a game changer. A steel vessel with nickel on one side, hydrogen on the other, and water in between, it cannot catch fire the way a lithium-ion battery can.

It uses no lithium. It uses no cobalt, the metal dug in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Chinese companies and refined in China. Its raw materials, by the company’s own list, are steel, nickel, fiberglass, resin, and water—four of them mined or refined in America, the fifth mined next door in Canada. And it runs 30 years, 10 times the life of the lithium-ion cells now going onto the American grid.

The American taxpayer built this battery twice. NASA developed the nickel-hydrogen battery half a century ago and has flown it ever since; the Hubble telescope ran on it for 19 years. But it needed platinum, and engineers built it one cell at a time for spacecraft. It was too expensive for anything on Earth.

Then a Stanford laboratory, on Energy Department money—the American taxpayer’s dime—found a way to make it without the platinum. The cost problem was solved. The commercial door was open.

Today, EnerVenue has the one storage chemistry that could let America compete in one of the world’s fastest-growing battery markets without buying a single cell from China’s supply chain. It is exactly the technology that could get us out from under Beijing. Instead, EnerVenue’s first factory is in Changzhou, China. How did this happen?

Peel back the curtain, and you quickly see yet another sneak attack on America’s technology front. Start with the money. The lead investor in the $300 million round that built the Changzhou factory is the family office of Peter Lee Ka-kit, heir to one of Hong Kong’s largest property fortunes and a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. That’s the body Beijing uses to enroll wealthy men who are not Chinese Communist Party members and expects them to carry the party’s line. Alongside Lee is an investment fund wholly owned by the Hong Kong government.

Then there’s the German CEO. Rath admits building in China was “one of my pre-conditions” for taking the job. His rationale: the “secret sauce” of the industrial cluster around Changzhou—“hydraulics experts, pneumatic experts, automation experts, everything in one cluster.” What he does not say is that the cluster is the product of massive Chinese supply-chain subsidies.

This is Chinese mercantilism running wild in the city that calls itself China’s “new energy capital.” By its own government’s count, Changzhou makes one-fifth of China’s energy-storage batteries, and two of China’s largest battery makers, CALB and SVOLT, are headquartered there—the first of them carved out of the state aerospace conglomerate and bought into the city by the municipal government itself.

The subsidies don’t come as a check to EnerVenue. The subsidies are the city itself. That’s the predatory weapon China fans out over so many economic and technology fronts.