Revisiting a Chinese Resource Curse: China’s Global Battery Supply Chain

• In Event: Politics of Future Energy Resources and Technology

Abstract

The Chinese resource curse theory posits a connection between resource extraction and human rights abuses in developing countries, a relationship established since China’s entry into the global natural resource market. It becomes imperative to scrutinize the causal endogeneity, questioning whether the human rights conditions in these resource-exporting countries worsened with increased economic dependence on China or vice versa. When there is a substantial surge in global demand for lithium batteries, China has asserted its dominance in the global supply chain since the 2010s, particularly capturing 80% of the global chemical refining process for rare earth materials. Consequently, numerous developing countries have directed their exports of crucial raw materials such as lithium, graphite, nickel, manganese, and cobalt to China. The inquiry arises as to why these countries predominantly choose China over other lithium battery-producing countries for their key raw material exports. This research aims to answer these inquiries by employing an inferential spatial network analysis. Each country is treated as a node, and its trading volume of the five key raw materials forms links in the network spanning from 2010 to 2021. The study calculates crucial values of centrality, density, and modularity within the trade network, incorporating temporal exponential random graph models alongside human rights data. The findings demonstrate that countries grappling with human rights abuses exhibit a preference for trading with China over other battery-producing countries, contributing to China’s hegemony in the global battery supply chain. This, in turn, unveils a new discourse on the Chinese resource curse.

Authors

• Hye Ryeon Jang, Morehouse College

• Kyshan Jay Nichols-Smith, Morehouse College

• Myles Ndiritu, Morehouse College