A middling player in the auto industry just a few years ago, the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD surpassed Tesla last year to become the world’s top-selling E.V. brand and is expected to pull even with the world’s biggest carmakers, Toyota and Volkswagen, by 2030.
Yet most Americans have never even seen a BYD and probably won’t anytime soon.
然而，大多数美国人从未见过比亚迪汽车，而且短期内恐怕也不会见到。
BYD, which stands for “Build Your Dreams,” is essentially banned from American roads by tariffs, imposed to protect U.S. automakers, that double the price of imported Chinese plug-ins. Erecting tariff walls may buy the domestic auto industry some time, but it ultimately won't insulate American manufacturers from BYD or the bigger threat that it represents.
由于关税，这个以英文“Build Your Dreams”（成就梦想）的缩写为名的品牌相当于被禁止驶上美国的道路，这些关税是为了保护美国汽车制造商而设，使进口的中国插电式汽车的价格翻倍。筑起关税壁垒或许能为本国汽车行业争取到一些时间，但最终并不能使美国制造商免受比亚迪——以及它所代表的更大威胁——的冲击。
The company embodies a Chinese industrial model that is leaving America in the dust. This model, which combines government financial support, methodical long-term planning and aggressive innovation, has enabled China to achieve global dominance in a range of high-tech industries, from batteries to robotics to drones. Losing those markets to Chinese companies was bad enough. If the same happens in auto manufacturing, the impact would be far worse for America because of the industry’s size and its economic, political and strategic importance.
The success of BYD and several other upstart Chinese car brands should be a warning for U.S. auto manufacturing and our industrial sector as a whole. We need the courage to recognize how badly we are falling behind, shake off complacency and adopt an urgent government-led effort — think of a Manhattan Project but for cars — to restore U.S. competitiveness.
When I opened my automotive business in Beijing in 1992, cars produced by China’s then-fledgling auto industry were terrible. Shoddily designed and made from cheap materials, they were quick to break down, befitting the country’s reputation at the time as a factory for inferior knockoffs. BYD, a battery manufacturer that began making cars in 2003, was no exception. For years, its cars were notorious in China as clunkers.
Those days are long gone. I’ve driven nearly every BYD model, and they are now as good as other top brands like Tesla in terms of design, features, advanced technologies and overall quality. The company’s Blade battery is among the safest and most cost-efficient in the world, so good that Toyota and Tesla have used it in some of their cars. Most worrying for its competitors, BYDs are affordable: Its least expensive models sell in China for under $10,000, a third of the price of the most affordable electric vehicles available in the U.S. market.
How did BYD pull this off? “Government subsidies!” Western critics will cry, and that’s of course part of the story. Chinese automakers such as BYD are believed to have received billions of dollars’ worth of state support over the years. This is state capitalism at work. Americans can complain about it all they want, but China isn’t going to scrap this model just because we don’t like it.
在设计、功能、先进技术和整体质量方面，中国汽车现在已经与特斯拉等顶级品牌一样出色。 Felix Schmitt for The New York Times
It’s also not the only reason for BYD’s success. It can build cars inexpensively thanks to what’s known as vertical integration. While most major carmakers source many important parts from outside suppliers, BYD makes almost all of its key components in-house, including batteries, semiconductors, motors and tablet screens, which saves costs and enhances quality control. It developed its cars’ operating software, has stakes in mines and mining companies that produce the minerals for its batteries and transports its vehicles around the world aboard its fleet of specially designed car-carrier ships.
BYD is also rapidly innovating. This year it unveiled an autonomous driving system that may be as good as Tesla’s, if not better, and technology that BYD says can charge cars in just five minutes — as quickly as filling a gas tank. Its top-end models include the YangWang U8, a luxury S.U.V. that can rotate 360 degrees in place and operate in water like a boat over short distances.
There’s an argument to be made that we should just let BYD into the U.S. market. It would give American consumers more bang for their buck and U.S. manufacturers a chance to learn from the company.
But BYD now has such overwhelming advantages in costs and battery technologies that it could end up destroying its U.S. competitors, endangering a critical American industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is why Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, last year called Chinese electric vehicles an existential threat and why Elon Musk said they will “demolish” the competition without trade barriers.
We can coddle American companies with tariffs, but it won’t change the fact that we are losing badly. China is, far and away, the world’s largest producer and exporter of all types of cars, including electrics. BYD and its Chinese peers may be shut out of the United States, but they are seizing control of the fast-growing global E.V. industry. Unable to compete abroad, U.S. automakers will have to retreat into the narrow space where they remain strong: the domestic market for gas-guzzling trucks and S.U.V.s.
America must take a page from China’s playbook. Ten years ago, Chinese leaders created a blueprint for domination of next-generation technologies, funneling huge sums of money into the project, knowing it would take years to pay off. BYD is just one of many examples of how this is now bearing fruit. Following China’s lead, with its heavy state involvement, would be a tough sell to many in Washington. But America has never confronted an industrial competitor like China.
And this isn’t only about electric vehicles. A strong auto sector has important implications for national defense. Technologies developed by the automotive industry such as batteries, sensors and motors are often later adapted for use in military equipment.
China’s control of supply chains for batteries and rare earth minerals used in electric vehicles is also a potential national security threat, one that we glimpsed recently when Beijing retaliated against U.S. trade tariffs by halting exports of rare earths and the magnets made from them.
Led by its national champion BYD, China has overtaken Detroit as the center of the global auto industry. America can embark on an all-out push to rebuild world-class manufacturing and supply chains, or our carmakers can hide behind tariffs, continue making gas-powered trucks and S.U.V.s and fade into irrelevance.
除了对西方视觉文明与文体的引进，影戏小说的写作对传统小说的体例也有所继承，如上所说，影剧颇似历史上后来兴起的电视剧，每次播放二三十分钟的片断，结尾留有悬念，这种循环连载的方式，其实甚合中国古典小说的章回小说传统，于是陆澹盦也在小说中运用了多种传统小说的技巧来处理现代视觉文明的经验和西方故事。我们或可将其理解为一种东西方文化接触时的文化转译活动，这是晚清民初社会生活中一个重要的理解维度与研究的方向，如何把西方文化和现代经验引入中国语境，如何弥合语言，伦理，宗教等范式的张力，在这一文化冲击激烈的时期，是颇具兴味和十足值得研读思量的。西方汉学家如胡志德（Theodore Huters）曾撰书《把世界带回家》（Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China）将这种特殊时期的文化生产做统摄性的研究。具体到小说这一纸上媒介与电影这一视觉文本的转化，其实是对过往文化范式的重大挑战：中国传统文化中书之成文的“立言”传统，成为将现实中视觉性的景观、器物、表演，以及抽象性的言语与情感体验，永久性保存的一种最有效途径。简言之，文本是第一性的。施济群在《毒手》序言中就谈及“同人往观之，深恨此俶奇诡异之佳片仅电光火石，一现昙花，因谋所以永之者”，也就是说，再好的电影，如果没有文本化，被刻成字，始终是昙花一现。我们或可以说，在面对视觉现代性的挑战与诱惑时，这批有着传统襟怀的文人，选择了最熟悉的方式给这种视觉奇观以回应。
目前有26个州禁止或限制非美国人在其境内购买或投资农业用地。 Loren Elliott for The New York Times
The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would seek to limit Chinese and foreign purchases of American farmland, citing a threat to national security.
特朗普政府周二表示，鉴于对国家安全构成的威胁，将设法限制中国和外国购买美国农田。
In a seven-point national security plan, the Agriculture Department said it would enhance public disclosures of foreign ownership of farmland, enact steeper penalties for false filings and work with Congress and states to ban purchases from foreign adversaries.
American agriculture is “under threat from criminals, from political adversaries and from hostile regimes that understand our way of life as a profound and existential threat to themselves,” the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, said in a news conference on Tuesday.
The move underscores the increasing concern in recent years over foreign, particularly Chinese, ownership of American farmland. In 2023, the Senate voted 91 to 7 to block businesses based in China from purchasing American farmland, after a Chinese company’s attempted purchase of cropland for a corn mill near a military base in North Dakota. And in 2024, the Biden administration proposed a rule to make it significantly harder for foreign businesses to buy land near locations deemed important to national security.
Twenty-six states currently prohibit or limit non-Americans from purchasing or investing in agricultural land within their boundaries. While there is no federal law barring the practice, a 1978 law requires foreign owners to report their holdings — though the disclosure requirements have been criticized as lax and the government’s data collection as slow and error-prone.
In 2023, the year with the most recent data available, foreigners owned nearly 45 million acres of cropland and forests. That equated to about 3.5 percent of all agricultural land in the country, but represented a more than 70 percent increase from a decade earlier. Canadians owned the largest amount — 15.3 million acres, or about a third — while China held more than 270,000 acres.
Ms. Rollins said in the news conference that the Trump administration was also exploring ways to “claw back” existing foreign purchases of farmland.
罗林斯在新闻发布会上表示，特朗普政府也在探索如何“收回”现有的外国购买农田。
Other elements of the Agriculture Department’s plan include identifying and refocusing domestic production of critical farming inputs like fertilizers; cracking down on fraud in nutrition assistance programs like food stamps; enhancing security in agricultural research; re-evaluating department programs that support foreign nations; defending against animal and plant diseases; and helping private food and agriculture companies protect their operations from cyberattacks.
德国汉堡港平板火车上的集装箱，摄于今年4月。欧盟仍向中国出口大量产品，尤其是德国。 Sean Gallup/Getty Images
It once looked to many as if President Trump could be a reason for Europe and China to bring their economies closer. His planned tariffs did little to distinguish the European Union, a longtime ally of the United States, from China, the principal challenger to American primacy.
Instead, the European Union finds itself in a geopolitical chokehold between the world’s two largest economies.
欧盟反而发现自己处于世界两个最大经济体之间的地缘政治夹缝中。
In Brussels, officials are trying to secure a rough trade deal with their American counterparts before Mr. Trump hits the bloc with high, across-the-board tariffs that could clobber the bloc’s economy. At the same time, European Union policymakers are trying to prod their counterparts in Beijing to stop supporting Russia, to stop helping Chinese industry with so much state money and to slow the flow of cheap goods into the European Union.
But at a moment of upheaval in the global trading system, the bloc also needs to keep its relationship with China, the world’s leading manufacturing superpower, on a relatively stable footing.
Leaders from the European Union are scheduled to be in Beijing for a summit in late July, plans for which have been in flux. Hopes for the gathering are low. Even as China pushes the idea that Mr. Trump’s hostility to multilateral trade is prodding Europe into its arms, Europe’s problems with China are only growing.
“There is no China card for Europe,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“欧洲没有中国牌，”美国外交关系委员会欧洲问题研究员莉安娜·菲克斯说。
欧盟委员会副主席卡雅·卡拉斯和中国外交部长王毅上周在布鲁塞尔。
Tensions were on full display last week, when Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, visited Brussels for meetings in the run-up to the summit. China portrayed the tone as productive and dismissed the notion that the two sides had conflicts. European Union officials stressed lingering pain points, including trade imbalances.
The divide was underscored this weekend. The European Union recently moved to curb government spending on medical devices from China, arguing that Chinese government agencies had been treating European companies unfairly and that it was necessary to level the playing field. China on Sunday announced that it would retaliate.
Yet the European Union remains in a delicate dance with China. Economic ties between the two economies are extensive. Many European countries remain heavily dependent on China for industrial materials. And European exports to China remain substantial, especially from Germany, which has long had close trade ties with China.
But Europe’s exports have been dwindling, even as Chinese imports into the bloc have been surging. As cheap products from the fast fashion retailers Shein and Temu flood into European markets, policymakers have been working to tighten restrictions on such imports. And European leaders regularly complain that China’s state-controlled banks subsidize the country’s manufacturers so heavily that European companies can’t compete.
Nor are Europe’s complaints unique to trade. European Union officials are angry about China’s support for Russia during the war in Ukraine, providing a market for Russian fuel and other products that has blunted the bite of European sanctions.
The European Union’s aim cannot be to cut ties with China, according to the Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen. “It is about engaging on a more equal footing and being more transactional in our approach,” he said, speaking at a briefing with reporters on Friday.
As the United States upends the global trading system in a bid to shrink its trade deficit, raise revenue and re-shore domestic manufacturing, the European Union finds itself in a lonely place. It is a bloc of 27 nations that together make the world’s third-largest economy. The European Union was devised to promote commerce across borders and remains a powerful defender of free trade.
Europe wants to “show to the world that free trade with a large number of countries is possible on a rules-based foundation,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive branch, said at a news conference last month.
The European Union has already deepened its trading relationships with like-minded countries like Switzerland and Canada. Ms. von der Leyen suggested that it could go a step further. It could pursue a new collaboration between the bloc and a trading group of 11 countries that includes Japan, Vietnam and Australia, but that notably does not include the United States or China.
Yet even as Ms. von der Leyen tries to go on the offensive, E.U. officials have spent months on a far more defensive footing.
但就在冯德莱恩试图采取攻势的时候，欧盟官员们数月来却始终疲于防守。
That is because even as the European Union takes issue with the policies coming out of the United States and China, it is also being battered by — and torn between — the two.
究其根源，欧盟在质疑美国和中国的政策时，也深陷两国夹击的撕裂困境。
零售商Shein的包裹在中国广州的一家服装厂等待发货，摄于今年2月。
No matter the outcome of its trade talks with the Trump administration, the European Union is expected to end up with higher tariffs on its exports to the United States than it faced at the start of the year. American officials have said repeatedly that 10 percent across-the-board levies are not negotiable.
Officials are also likely to be compelled to make concessions to secure an agreement. Those include a possible commitment to taking a tougher stance toward China.
欧盟官员们也可能为达成协议被迫做出让步，包括承诺对华采取更强硬的立场。
The European Union agrees with Mr. Trump that China has pursued unfair trading practices. Yet the bloc can push China only so far, given how intertwined the economies are.
China has recently offered the European Union a damaging reminder of that reality.
中国最近已以极具痛感的现实给欧盟上了一课。
In response to U.S. tariffs, China limited global exports of rare earth magnets, which are critical to producing a range of goods from cars and drones to factory robots and missiles.
Because China dominates rare earth production, it can inflict serious pain on its trading partners with such limitations.
由于中国主导着稀土生产，它能用这种限制重创贸易伙伴。
European policymakers initially hoped that China’s restrictions would mainly affect American companies. But European firms have also faced long delays in getting China to approve its purchases of rare earths.
The slowdown is caused not only by logistical kinks as China works through a queue of applications. Instead, it appears to be tied to a longer-standing trade flashpoint between Europe and China.
The Chinese government has for years required that foreign companies share or transfer technology to their Chinese partners as a condition for entering the China market. Recently, European carmakers and other companies have found themselves far behind their Chinese competitors, which have led the development of electric cars, solar panels and other technologies.
Given that, European Union officials have been pressing Chinese companies to transfer technology as part of the price of admission to the European market.
鉴于此，欧盟官员正要求中国企业以技术转让作为进入欧洲市场的交换条件。
The European Union has also joined the United States in restricting the shipment to China of equipment to make the fastest semiconductors, which have military as well as civilian applications.
欧盟还追随美国，限制向中国出口先进制程半导体设备，这种半导体既能军用，也能民用。
That has annoyed Chinese officials. China’s minister of commerce, Wang Wentao, called for Europe to cancel controls on high-tech exports to China as part of discussions on a resumption of rare earth supplies.
“Minister Wang Wentao expressed the hope that the E.U. will meet us halfway and take effective measures to facilitate, safeguard and promote the compliant trade of high-tech products to China,” the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement last month.
At the Beijing summit this month, he said, European officials are likely to keep pushing Chinese officials for more consistent access to rare earths.
欧洲官员可能会在本月的北京峰会上继续向中国官员施压，让他们提供更为稳定的稀土供应渠道。
Jens Eskelund, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said the chamber also wants the meetings to focus on trying to persuade Chinese officials on the need for more transparent and predictable regulations and to address how hard it has become for foreign companies to do business in China.
But the outlook for meaningful changes, or anything that draws Europe and China closer, is dim. The tone coming from Europe is not positive.
但发生有意义的变化，或出现任何能让欧盟与中国拉近关系的可能性并不大。欧盟的态度不乐观。
Ms. von der Leyen, in a speech at the Group of 7 meeting in Canada last month, said China was engaged in a cycle of “dominance, dependency and blackmail.”
欧盟委员会副主席卡雅·卡拉斯和中国外交部长王毅上周在布鲁塞尔。
俄罗斯导弹袭击了乌克兰斯洛维扬斯克，摄于上个月。欧盟官员对中国在俄乌战争中支持俄罗斯感到愤怒。
零售商Shein的包裹在中国广州的一家服装厂等待发货，摄于今年2月。
上海汽车工业集团有限公司与大众汽车合资企业在上海的一个汽车存放场，摄于今年4月。
