Global auto giants race to adopt China’s EV tech—who benefits from this geopolitical tech transfer?
Original framing: “Volkswagen, in strategy shift, plans to globalise China-developed technology - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Workers in Chinese battery factories, like those at CATL, report 75-hour weeks with no unions—a reality erased by the ‘global tech leader’ narrative. Congolese miners, such as those in Kolwezi, face child labor and mercury poisoning, yet their voices are absent from ‘green tech’ discussions. Feminist economists like Silvia Federici highlight how ‘progress’ narratives often rely on invisible, exploited labor, a pattern repeating in EV supply chains.
Volkswagen’s tech shift is not an isolated corporate decision but a symptom of a fractured global system where automakers, governments, and investors prioritize speed and geopolitical leverage over equity and ecology.
Historical patterns—from colonial extraction to today’s debt-trap infrastructure loans—reveal how ‘globalization’ is a tool of power, not progress, with marginalized communities bearing the costs while Western firms reap the benefits. The absence of Indigenous knowledge, labor voices, and cross-cultural ethics in this narrative underscores a deeper failure: treating technology as a neutral force rather than a site of contestation. Solutions require dismantling the trickster’s illusion—that ‘innovation’ is inevitable—and replacing it with frameworks that center justice, such as ethical tech transfer agreements, labor-led transitions, and cultural sovereignty in policy. The path forward lies not in accelerating the current model but in reimagining it through the lenses of those it has historically excluded.