Sodium-ion batteries have started to appear in cars and home storage

Where are all the commenters about how China can't innovate and they can only steal technology now...

Reverse that, why don't other countries / companies try and steal their talent and IP? Is everyone resigned to think that China are undefeatable on the technology/manufacturing of these batteries?

China has by this point large advantages in industrial ecosystems and modest cost labor, and that the state is willing to make large long-term bets on technologies it sees as important in the future.

It's not insurmountable for 'the West' to claw back some of that manufacturing, including high-tech items like batteries. It will take a large, long-time and very expensive effort, however. But talk is cheap, and largely 'the West' has drunken the neoliberalism kool-aid and is staring at quarterly shareholder value so little gets done.

Heck, some Western government are even in bed with the fossil fuel industry, desperately trying to hold back progress in order to claw a bit more profit out of the industry before the full force of the electric revolution hits.

It used to be the case that the USA was very successfull in making the talent (from everywhere, not just China) "steal" itself to the USA.

I have heard that the USA has abandoned that strategy recently, but I think it is too early to see any impact.

The sodium ion battery was invented over 200 years ago. No one needs to steal the technology, and manufacturing is basically the same.

All the research is in finding ever better combinations of anode/cathode.

Lithium mining and processing is dominated by Western countries, which is why China is incentivised to develop and manufacture sodium ion batteries. They know the game and haven't ignored it, unlike the West who ignored the geopolitical risk of China dominating rare earth processing for 20+ years.

The West should have a similar incentive despite having most of the lithium, namely supply risks for graphite, cobalt and nickel. There is a lot of research going on but mostly in Europe.

I would criticize the USA's strategies in this regard but it seems that might put me in the crosshairs of their strategies...

> The sodium ion battery was invented over 200 years ago.

Citation needed

> All the research is in finding ever better combinations of anode/cathode.

Trivial matter then.

> But talk is cheap, and largely 'the West' has drunken the neoliberalism kool-aid and is staring at quarterly shareholder value so little gets done.

The west is mostly drunk on populism, nativism and boomer welfare. If it were the neoliberal hellscape you imagine, it'd at least be competitive.

Some innovations are intimately coupled with scale through the learning rate and cannot be ported from one country to another.

And workers rights, minimum wage and immigration restrictions. This trifecta of anti-neoliberal policies destroyed manufacturing competitiveness. But the term "neoliberal" has become a slur which is defined as "subset of the status quo that I don't like", and it will endlessly shapeshift so that it can be blamed for whatever is being discussed.

I fear caution won't make one safe from stupidity anyway. They'll find a post about transgenic mice or something and then it's goodbye Archibald Buttle. :/

Populism and anti immigrant sentiment will kill all progress in the west.

The anti-China story on Sodium batteries used to be that the evil Chinese had monopolised all the lithium that the rest of the world mines and then ships to them for processing and turning into batteries.

So American companies would develop sodium instead and break this market wide open.

But the Chinese appear to have beat them to it.

> And workers rights, minimum wage and immigration restrictions. This trifecta of anti-neoliberal policies destroyed manufacturing competitiveness.

The thing is, 996 works in China because China is a dictatorship where workers have no rights and for a lot of them 996 is better than the utter poverty they came from.

But we? We cannot compete with 996, not if we don't devolve to outright slavery, to conditions of the 1800s.

I think it's pretty peak neoliberalism to discover and double down on collecting rents and trading make believe financial instruments in air conditioned offices than do dirty work making commodity widgets. Peak neolibralism seems like optmizing for spreadsheet competitiveness longterm and we're rapidly finding out that is not the right kind of competitiveness.

Sure, we don't have to be competitive with China on manufacturing, but that is hardly the fault of neoliberalism, which was the subject of discussion. It's quite squarely the "fault" of anti-neoliberal policies like immigration restrictions and minimum wage. We could have had Chinese workers on Chinese wages on Western soil making widgets for Western firms, basically a neoliberal wet dream, but that was prevented by anti-neoliberal policies.

It's not really the innovation part. The Chinese actually put research into mass production.

At some point when Americans were still denying climate change the CCP looked at the massive environmental destruction around them and decided to do something about it.