This is a patent application filed by a Chinese company in multiple countries to protect its novel design for an E.V. battery.

这是一家中国企业为保护它在电动汽车电池方面的创新设计在多国提交的专利申请。

In 2000, Chinese applicants filed 18 clean energy patents that analysts said were internationally competitive.

2000年，中国的申请人提交了18项分析人士认为具国际竞争力的清洁能源专利。

In 2022, Chinese applicants filed more than 5,000.

到2022年，该领域中国的申请人提交的专利超过5000项。

Over two decades China has leapt ahead of other countries, churning out innovative designs for the energy mix of the future: solar and wind power, batteries and electric cars.

20多年来，中国在为未来能源领域——太阳能、风能、电池和电动汽车——持续产出创新设计，已遥遥领先于其他国家。

数据来源：欧洲专利局、Espacenet。注：清洁能源类别包括电池、生物燃料、氢能、光伏和超级电容器。

Accused for years of copying the technologies of other countries, China now dominates the renewable energy landscape not just in terms of patent filings and research papers, but in what analysts say are major contributions that will help to move the world away from fossil fuels.

多年来被指责抄袭其他国家技术的中国，如今不仅在可再生能源领域的专利与论文数量上占据了主导地位，而且——据分析人士称——还作出了有助于推动全球摆脱化石燃料的重大贡献。

高质量专利来源分布：中国领跑电池与太阳能领域，欧洲主导风能及智能电网。数据来源：欧洲专利局。注：不包括水电和氢燃料类别，这些类别在清洁技术专利总数中所占份额较小。

“It may sound simplistic, but the ultimate indicator of patent quality is how much money a company or institution has spent on protecting its application, including by filing it in many countries,” said Yann Ménière, chief economist at the European Patent Office, which shared the most robust data available on trends in competitive patent filings with The New York Times. “Purely based on that, we can see how China has gone from being an imitator to an innovator.”

“这听起来可能很简单，但专利质量的终极指标是一家企业或机构为保护申请所花费的资金，包括跨国申请保护，”欧洲专利局首席经济学家雅恩·梅尼埃表示。该机构向《纽约时报》分享了有关竞争性专利申请趋势的最权威数据。“仅凭这一点，我们就可以看到中国是如何从模仿者转变为创新者的。”

The European Patent Office data considers any application that has been filed in two or more countries to be high quality, based on the assumption that companies went through the trouble and expense of applying for a patent in more than one market with the intention of protecting their invention across borders. Patents prevent others from making, using or selling the innovation without permission for a specified period of time.

欧洲专利局将在两国及以上国家申请的专利定义为高质量专利，理由是企业既然花费时间和资金在多个市场申请专利，就意味着它们有意跨国保护自己的发明。专利在特定期限内禁止他人在未经许可的情况下制造、使用或销售该项创新。

By that measure, China applied for more than twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the United States in 2022, the most recent year of complete data. And while Chinese applicants continue to file a large number of lower-quality patents that may be duplicative or insignificantly different from existing inventions, a growing proportion are of higher quality.

据此标准，2022年中国高质量清洁能源专利申请量是美国的两倍多。尽管中国申请人仍在提交大量低质量专利（与现有发明重复或者差异不大），但高质量专利占比持续攀升。

That trend has been driven by strategic policies from Beijing as well as a maturing of China’s academic research environment.

这一趋势是由中国政府的战略政策及学术研究环境的成熟所推动的。

“It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.

“这绝非偶然，”澳大利亚战略政策研究所的分析师和数据科学家珍妮·梁黄说，该研究所建立了一个涵盖全球关键技术研究的数据库（这些技术关系到各国的经济和军事安全），其中包括清洁能源在内。

Last summer, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party who gathered to plan the country’s future paid more attention to scientific training and education than any other policy except for measures to strengthen the party itself.

去年夏天，中共领导层开会规划国家未来，除加强党建措施之外，他们最重视的就是科技培训与教育。

In mid-2015, the Chinese government announced a program called “Made in China 2025.” It would provide companies in 10 strategic industries with large, low-interest loans from state-owned investment funds and development banks, assistance in acquiring foreign competitors and generous subsidies for scientific research. At the time, the stated goal was that Chinese companies would control 80 percent of the domestic markets of those industries by 2025.

2015年中，中国政府推出“中国制造2025”计划，为十大战略产业提供国有投资基金和开发银行的大额低息贷款，海外并购支持及科研补贴。当时的目标是到2025年实现这些产业80%的国内市场自主掌控。

That effort has largely succeeded, Dr. Wong Leung and other analysts said.

梁黄和其他分析师表示，这一目标已经基本实现。

Chinese clean tech companies have come to dominate both domestic and international markets. While Western countries like the United States and Australia pioneered now-widespread technologies like solar panels, batteries and supercapacitors (which are like batteries, only smaller, and provide quick bursts of energy), China is now building on those designs and creating new, groundbreaking versions.

中国的清洁技术企业在国内外市场都已占据主导地位。虽然美国和澳大利亚等西方国家率先开发了如今广泛使用的太阳能电池板、电池和超级电容器（瞬时提供巨大能量的微型电池）等技术，但中国现在正在这些设计的基础上进行创新，并创造出具突破性的新版本。

“The sheer volume of Chinese investment has been so much larger than in the West,” Dr. Wong Leung said. “It meant they could build industries from the ground up, all the way through the supply chain.”

“中国投资规模远超西方，”梁黄强调，“意味着他们能建立贯穿整个供应链的工业体系。"

清洁能源研究主导地位的逆转：中国在全球同行评议期刊的高被引论文数量迅猛增长。数据来源：澳大利亚战略政策研究所，关键技术追踪器。注：上表展示每个国家或地区在所有清洁能源子类别中高被引研究的占比。

But it hasn’t just been about money, analysts said. The Chinese government has encouraged cutthroat domestic competition that some economists have likened to “economic Darwinism.”

分析人士指出，这不仅仅是资金问题。中国政府鼓励激烈的国内竞争，一些经济学家将其比喻为“经济达尔文主义”。

Sam Adham, head of battery materials at CRU Group, a market analysis company, described a typical scenario: First comes a flood of subsidies into a particular industry that the government has deemed strategic. Companies pile in, filing dozens or even hundreds of patents along the way. In the final stage, Mr. Adham said, the government pulls the subsidies and the less competitive companies essentially are “culled,” while “the remaining companies emerge stronger and they go overseas and take market share there.”

市场分析公司CRU集团的电池材料主管萨姆·阿德汉姆描述了典型的发展路径：首先是政府选定战略产业注入大量补贴。企业蜂拥而入，并在此过程中提交几十甚至上百项专利申请。阿德汉姆说，在最后阶段，政府撤回补贴，竞争力较弱的企业基本上会被“淘汰”，而“幸存企业变得更强大，出海争夺市场份额。”

Take, for instance, batteries for electric vehicles. While the original breakthroughs in producing lithium-ion batteries were made in the United States three decades ago, further research received little government backing there. Meanwhile, Chinese companies grabbed the baton.

以电动车电池为例。虽然在30年前，美国率先在锂离子电池生产方面取得了突破性进展，但后续研究缺乏政府支持。中国企业则接棒领跑。

BYD, based in Shenzhen, recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest manufacturer of electric cars, and CATL, a Chinese rival based in Ningde, produces the most batteries. BYD and CATL have both relied on lithium-ion batteries that use relatively inexpensive iron and phosphate, combined with lithium, rather than nickel and cobalt, which Western producers have favored. Through patented breakthroughs, the Chinese companies made their batteries lighter, longer-lasting, faster to charge and cheaper to produce.

总部位于深圳的比亚迪最近超越特斯拉成为全球最大的电动汽车制造商；而它在国内的竞争对手宁德时代是全球最大的电池生产商。比亚迪和宁德时代都依赖于一种由锂以及相对便宜的铁和磷酸盐组成的锂离子电池，而不是西方生产商偏好的镍和钴。通过取得专利的技术突破，这些中国公司让电池更轻、更耐用、充电更快、生产成本更低。

Those improvements are making electric cars safer and more convenient to drive, too.

这些改进也使电动车驾驶起来更安全、更便捷。

A research team at CATL, which supplies batteries to electric automakers like Tesla and BMW, developed a way to minimize fire risk in car batteries that won a European Inventor Award in 2023. The series of patents, with unremarkable-sounding descriptions about battery covers and short circuits, amount to a major step forward in preventing catastrophic heat buildup and explosions when electric vehicles are overcharged.

宁德时代也在为特斯拉和宝马等电动汽车制造商提供电池，它的一个研究团队开发了一种将汽车电池火灾风险降至最低的方法，并在2023年获得了欧洲发明家奖。这一系列专利虽然听起来只是关于电池盖和短路的技术描述，似乎平淡无奇，但实际上却是防止电动汽车在过充电时发生灾难性热量积聚和爆炸的重要技术突破。

使电池更安全的专利。左：防止过充损坏的电池保护板；中：短路防护盖板避免过充和穿刺起火；右：泄压设计防止危险气体聚爆。

China has nearly 50 graduate programs focused on battery chemistry and metallurgy. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 65.5 percent of widely cited technical papers on battery technology come from researchers in China, compared with 12 percent from the United States.

中国有近50个电池化学与冶金专业的研究生学位项目。据澳大利亚战略政策研究所的数据，在电池技术领域被广泛引用的科技论文中，65.5%出自中国的研究人员，而来自美国研究人员的仅占12%。

With its competitive advantage widening, China has sought to limit “technology leakage,” as some analysts put it. As of July, Beijing has restricted any effort to transfer out of China eight key technologies for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries, be that through trade, investment or technological cooperation.

随着优势扩大，中国开始试图限制一些分析人士所称的“技术泄漏”。自今年7月起，中国政府严禁通过贸易、投资、技术合作向境外转移电动汽车电池八大核心技术。

“China has often done this unofficially in the past,” Mr. Adham said, “but now it’s becoming written law.”

“中国过去常以非正式手段来管控，”阿德汉姆表示，“但现在已有明文法规。”

That would very likely cement China’s dominant role in producing batteries unless other countries invest similarly in research. Analysts say those moves make the global energy transition, which is central to efforts to limit human-driven climate change, ever more reliant on Chinese technologies.

这很可能巩固中国在电池生产领域的主导地位，除非其他国家也大举投资研究。分析人士表示，这些举措使全球能源转型——这是遏制人为气候变化努力的核心环节——越来越依赖中国的技术。

Biqing Yang, an analyst at Ember, a global energy research organization, created her own analysis of the European Patent Office’s data. “If you take China out of the data,” she said, “there are even recent years where you will find that global innovation has stagnated or even slowed down.”

全球能源研究机构Ember的分析师杨碧清（音）对欧洲专利局的数据进行了自己的分析。“如果你把中国从数据中剔除，”她说，“在最近几年，你甚至会发现全球创新出现了放缓和停滞。”

And she said that recent announcements from the Chinese government indicated it was nudging companies to look beyond solar panels and batteries to more nascent technologies.

她还表示，中国政府最近的表态表明，它正在推动企业将目光投向太阳能电池板和电池之外，转向更新兴的技术。

“Carbon capture, smart grids, the electrification of heavy industry, those are the frontiers,” Ms. Yang said.

“碳捕获、智能电网、重工业电气化，这些都是前沿领域，”杨碧清说。