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June 23, 2024

European officials have largely been in favor of investments from Chinese battery makers such as CATL and from Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers such as BYD in Hungary and Chery Automobile in Spain.

While Chinese purchases of existing European businesses have collapsed in recent years, in part because of growing European scrutiny, greenfield investment—i.e. newly created companies or plants—has risen rapidly, reaching 78% of all Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe last year, according to data compiled by the Mercator Institute for China Studies and Rhodium Group.

At the core of this strategy is a fear that Europe, and especially Germany, which relies much more on manufacturing than the U.S., could be hit by one of two nightmare scenarios: a global trade war, or a new flood of cheap Chinese imports.

European Union regulators this month signaled plans to impose relatively modest tariffs—the highest will be half the 100% recently announced by Pr

July 7, 2024

China is outspending the U.S., completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies.

Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has **10 times as many Ph.D.sin fusion science and engineering as the U.S. **

JP Allain, who heads the Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said China is spending around $1.5 billion a year on fusion, nearly twice the U.S. government’s fusion budget. What’s more, China appears to be following a program similar to the road map that hundreds of U.S. fusion scientists and engineers first published in 2020 in hopes of making commercial fusion energy.

“They’re building our long-range plan,” Allain said. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”

**Scientists familiar with China’s fusion facilities said that if it continues its