France’s newspaper of record has launched a four-part investigative series titled “How China Is Devouring Europe,” and the second installment published on June 7 offers a comprehensive recent account of how Beijing has systematically moved from assembling consumer electronics to controlling entire value chains across the industries that will define the 21st-century economy. The Le Monde analysis covers industrial AI, robotics, batteries, biotechnology, renewable and nuclear energy, and high-speed rail, and its central argument is that advanced economies, which outsourced production from the 1990s onward, are only now discovering the degree to which they have become dependent on China for nearly all emerging technologies.
The series arrives at a moment when the political and economic debate in Europe has shifted from whether to engage with China to how to reduce structural dependence without triggering trade disruptions that would devastate industries with no viable domestic alternative.
Electric Vehicles: Two-Thirds of the Global Market
The most striking data point in the Le Monde analysis concerns electric vehicles. In 2025, Chinese brands accounted for approximately two-thirds of global electric vehicle sales, a figure that reflects not just domestic dominance but also a global market share no single country has achieved in any major consumer goods category in recent memory. As China’s domestic EV market contracted slightly in 2026, partly due to the gradual phasing out of purchase subsidies, exports surged to compensate: Chinese EV exports surged 140 percent year-on-year, reaching 349,000 units in March 2026 alone.
Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the China Passenger Car Association, predicted that Chinese electric car exports to the European Union would grow at a 20 percent average annual rate between 2026 and 2028, a projection that, if accurate, would make Chinese EVs the dominant import category in the EU within the decade. BYD, the world’s sixth-largest automaker, has already acquired its own fleet of cargo ships to independently export one million cars per year, removing its dependence on third-party shipping capacity.
The cost advantage underpinning this export surge is structural, not cyclical. An International Energy Agency study updated in November 2025 found that production costs for electric vehicles in China were still 30 percent lower than at factories in the world’s most advanced economies. Worker wages are not the primary factor: NIO’s factory in Hefei, XPeng’s in Guangzhou, and BYD’s in Zhengzhou are almost entirely automated. Robotic arms lift and rotate steel frames, robot welders handle assembly, autonomous carts deliver components, and 3D scanners check for defects. The handful of workers present connect sensors and install seals. In 2025, China’s auto manufacturing sector produced a record 34.5 million vehicles, supported by a highly automated industrial base and a massive workforce.
The AI Layer: From Fast Follower to Genuine Innovator
The Le Monde series frames China’s AI development as a qualitative shift, not merely a quantitative one. China is no longer simply scaling up models that originated elsewhere, it is producing frontier-capable systems that are reshaping global developer ecosystems. Chinese open-weight models now account for 17.1 percent of global AI model downloads, surpassing the US share of 15.9 percent for the first time, driven by aggressive pricing and the competitive dynamics of China’s domestic AI market.
The deployment advantage is equally significant. As a CFR analysis published this week argues, China’s platform economy, with applications such as WeChat, Taobao, Meituan, and Douyin, provides an AI deployment infrastructure that the US lacks. Chinese AI models can reach hundreds of millions of users through existing platforms with minimal friction, generating the real-world data feedback loops that accelerate practical capability faster than benchmark performance alone.
The Strategic Dilemma for Europe
The Le Monde series is explicitly aimed at a European audience, and its political subtext is clear: the EU’s response to China’s industrial dominance has so far been reactive and piecemeal. Tariffs on Chinese EVs, announced in 2024 and implemented in 2025, have slowed but not reversed the surge in imports. The deeper problem, as the series frames it, is that Europe outsourced not just production but the knowledge, supply chains, and industrial ecosystems required to rebuild domestic capacity, and those cannot be reconstructed quickly or cheaply.
The parallel with China’s semiconductor self-reliance push is instructive. When the US imposed export controls on advanced chips, China accelerated domestic production and is now approaching competitive parity in mature nodes. The same dynamic may play out in batteries, pharmaceuticals, and industrial AI: external pressure accelerates the very self-reliance it was designed to prevent, while the countries applying the pressure discover they have fewer domestic alternatives than they assumed.
The Le Monde series is scheduled to continue with two further installments. The full scope of China’s industrial strategy and Europe’s options for responding to it will likely become clearer as the series progresses.