In Bid for Global Dominance, Beijing Builds EV Factories in Africa

JOHANNESBURG—China has started to build factories across Africa to manufacture electric vehicles, a strategy market analysts say will likely flood the world with cheap EVs and allow Chinese companies to dominate the global automobile industry far into the future. Automakers under the communist regime are already benefiting from huge subsidies, resulting in dramatic increases in production and allowing China to severely undercut prices of EVs made elsewhere, including in the United States. One study shows Beijing has given China’s EV manufacturers at least $231 billion in state aid over 15 years, from 2009 until the end of 2023. The automobile sector in mainland China has been the largest in the world measured by unit production since 2008, said JATO Dynamics, a global leader in automotive data, analysis, and intelligence....