Artificial demand is driving the electric vehicle market in China
We always talk about the great market potential of China but all I see is a massive bubble fuelled by money printing in the cellar of the Chinese Central Bank. Bribing vehicle owners into EV’s is just one of the myriad of schemes created to show that China is still a growing and healthy economy when in truth it is creaking at the seams. China is still a sweatshop – one that has used all the tricks in the book in order to portray itself as a developed economy but that was bought at the price of a broken country. Its air toxic, the lands wasted, the water undrinkable, and a population that has lost its values and needs to run like a Duracell rabbit only for surviving. Not my vision of the emerald city on the hill.
In China, if you buy an electric vehicle, you’ll receive a license plate for free — only one of the benefits the Chinese government is offering in order to rev up the country’s EV market. Chinese consumers bought more than double the number of electric cars that the U.S. did in 2016, according to analyst data, and the government has said it wants 11 percent of all cars sold there to be electric by 2020. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about the supply and demand of the Chinese electric vehicle industry. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
