Transcript: China's EV Explosion, with Ilaria Mazzocco of CSIS

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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China’s phenomenal surge in electric vehicle production and adoption, just in the last several years, has really astonished, and, in some cases, quite shocked the world with its apparent rapidity and sheer scale. During my first post-pandemic trip back to China in July of this year, I was pretty blown away by the dramatic increase in the number of EVs on the road in Beijing, I mean, I had been told that this was the case, but still, by the fact that the taxi fleet, with virtually no exceptions, was electric. When I was in Shenzhen in October, I was even more struck by how many EVs there were on the roads. I visited quite a number of showrooms in Beijing and Shanghai and other places to ogle the very slick vehicles on display, though I don’t have a Chinese driver’s license, unfortunately, so I didn’t test drive any of them, but I was really pretty impressed with what I saw. Whenever I took the ride-hail, rides on Didi and whatnot, the driver, when I was in an EV, I would grill him about his vehicle, or sometimes her vehicle, what they liked and what they didn’t like, and about whether there was sufficient charging infrastructure, whether the trip time was long enough, and on balance, people seemed pretty well pleased. But all of this, of course, was completely anecdotal.

Fortunately, a number of researchers are doing serious work on EVs and other aspects of China’s energy transition. And among the people doing the best work is Ilaria Mazzocco, deputy director and senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, in Washington, D. C. Ilaria has made multiple trips now to China, just in recent years, and has written extensively about the sector and about green industrial policy more broadly. I highly recommend her report called “Green Industrial Policy: A Holistic Approach,” which I’ll link to in the show notes. I am truly delighted to have her joining me on the podcast today. Ilaria, welcome to Sinica.

Ilaria Mazzocco: Thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure. I’ve been listening to the podcast for so long, so it’s kind of trippy to see you with your voice in the background because I’m used to doing all kinds of stuff like washing dishes and riding my bike when listening to you.

Kaiser: Oh, great. I’m flattered and I’m very honored to have you here. Since this is your first time on Sinica, perhaps you could do a little bit of a self-introduction. Talk a little bit about your educational and professional background and how you got so interested in and became such an expert in this incredibly important sector.

Ilaria: Yeah, so I guess it really starts with me being super bad at ancient Greek. I’m originally from Italy. I had a pretty classical Italian education. And I was really bad at ancient Greek, and that convinced me I had to leave my country, go to the United States, which is actually where my mother’s from, and then I decided I need to study a language that had nothing to do with European languages. And so that’s how I ended up on Chinese, basically — long story short — and took trips to China, study abroad, spent a year living in Kunming, which was tons of fun, but had no thoughts about electric vehicles. But later on, when I started my PhD at Johns Hopkins SAIS, I was really interested in a couple of different things. I was interested in climate policy, which considering this was around 2015, so already during my master’s I was looking at this. It was an area that was growing very quickly and developing really quickly, regulation and stuff, but also very important to me personally.

But then I was also really interested in local governments. So I went to China to start doing some field work, and I very quickly realized that nobody wanted to talk about all the very vague topics I had in mind and everybody just wanted to talk about electric vehicles. By this point, it was 2017. And China, the topic was just booming with anybody who had anything to do with either climate or transportation. And so I highly recommend this to PhD students who may be listening to this, and the recommendation is do something where people are willing to talk to you because it really makes things a lot easier if you can. The other thing is somebody had recommended to me, “Don’t try and pick a hot topic because you will not know what is a hot topic in 10 years,” and I also strongly recommend that. This was not a hot topic at all, and I could have not predicted that it was going to be just so relevant to international relations and China’s foreign relations overall. So that’s really how I got started with this and here we are today.

Kaiser: Yeah, yeah. So, that dimension of it, the impact on foreign relations is going to be something that I’m going to want to talk to you about. But let me ask you a little bit about this — because you have been doing real research — how do my anecdotal observations and perhaps even more breathless accounts that I’m sure you’ve read, I’ve read, everyone’s read about what an enormous lead China’s now taking in EVs, how do those observations stack up when compared to the reality that you’ve been studying? Because you’ve been on the ground, you’ve seen what things are there, you’re really talking to the people who are up and down the value chain. Are people right to be blown away by the progress China’s made in EVs?