What the Media, and Harvard, Miss About China’s Electric Cars

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A BYD Dolphin electric vehicle is pictured in a handout photo from the Chinese company.

Inexpensive Chinese-made electric cars are the subject of recent articles in three news outlets—the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Gazette, and Marketplace. All three omit or severely downplay two key aspects of the story—China’s ban on independent, free labor unions, and the national security risks of Chinese electric cars.

The Wall Street Journal story, headlined “What Scared Ford’s CEO in China,” is long and got prominent placement in Saturday’s print edition. It quotes Ford CEO Jim Farley describing Chinese electric vehicles as an “existential threat,” paraphrasing his concern about their “low-cost supply base.” The words “labor union” don’t appear in the Journal article. Nor is there any information about wages and working conditions at the Chinese automakers, and how they compare to those of American workers. 

Public radio’s Marketplace program does a bit better in a September 9 article by Jennifer Pak headlined “How can China make EVs that sell for less than $20,000?” That article reports that a BYD car assembly worker was being paid about $990 a month, working 270 to 280 hours a month, and getting one or two days off a month. As the Marketplace article puts it, “That means he works at least 67 hours per week with almost no rest during weekends. Wu earns, at best, about $3.60 per hour versus an average of 43 hours a week and $28 an hour for auto factory workers in the U.S. last year.”

Why wouldn’t the Chinese workers try to get together and organize to negotiate better wages and working conditions?

The explanation is available in the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report, in the section on worker rights in China. In sum, the only “union” that exists in China is one controlled by the Chinese Communist Party: “The law did not provide for freedom of association, and workers were not free to organize or join unions of their own choosing. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was the only union recognized under the law. Independent unions were illegal, and the law did not protect the right to strike. …There was no legal obligation for employers to negotiate or to bargain in good faith, and some employers refused to do so. …The law did not protect workers who requested or took part in collective negotiations with their employers independent of the officially recognized union.”

The “unions” in China represent the interest of the Chinese Communist Party, not the interest of the factory workers. More from the State Department report: “All union activity had to be approved by and organized under the ACFTU, a CCP organ chaired by a member of the Politburo. …The ACFTU and the CCP used a variety of mechanisms to influence the selection of trade union representatives. Although the law stated trade union officers at each level should be elected, ACFTU-affiliated unions appointed most factory-level union officers, often in coordination with employers. Official union leaders were often drawn from the ranks of management. Direct election by workers of union leaders continued to be rare, occurred only at the enterprise level, and was subject to supervision by higher levels of the union or the CCP. In enterprises where direct election of union officers took place, regional ACFTU officers and local CCP authorities retained control over the selection and approval of candidates. Even in these cases, workers and NGOs expressed concern regarding the credibility of elections.”

Anyone who tries to create a real union in Communist China risks getting thrown in prison by the Chinese Communists, the State Department says: “The ACFTU constituent unions were generally ineffective in representing and protecting the rights and interests of workers. Workers generally did not view the ACFTU as an advocate, especially migrant workers, who rarely interacted with union officials. The government effectively maintained the primacy of the ACFTU and prevented the emergence of independent labor organizations….Coordinated efforts by governments at the central, provincial, and local levels, including censorship, surveillance, harassment, detention, and travel restrictions on labor rights defenders and restrictions on funding sources for NGOs, disrupted labor rights advocacy. The government continued to target labor activists, students, and others advocating for worker rights. The International Labor Organization’s Committee on the Freedom of Association noted concern regarding the reports of government harassment, intimidation, arrests, and physical abuse.”

I’m familiar with and sympathetic to all the economic arguments for free trade and against tariffs, grounded in comparative advantage and mutual benefits. Yet it’s almost Orwellian to use the word “free” to describe trade with a dictatorial country that uses the coercive power of the Communist state to prevent workers from freely associating and bargaining collectively. 

Nor is American concern for Chinese workers entirely altruistic. Unfree regimes, like China, tend to be hostile not only to their own people but to the rest of the world. 

You don’t have to be a right-wing China hawk or a neoconservative to be concerned about the national security considerations for America of having a lot of Chinese-made vehicles on American roads. Democrat Gina Raimondo, the former governor of Rhode Island and the commerce secretary in the Biden-Harris administration, warned in a March 2024 television interview about both the surveillance capabilities of the Chinese cars and the risk that they could be remotely disabled. “The threats are potentially very significant,” she said. “Imagine a world where there’s 3 million Chinese vehicles on the road in America, and Beijing can turn them all off at the same time.”

Particularly disappointing is the article on Chinese EVs published by the Harvard Gazette, an organ of the Harvard University central administration. “EVs fight global warming but are costly. So why aren’t we driving $10,000 Chinese imports?” the Gazette article is headlined. The article, by “Harvard Staff Writer Alvin Powell,” entirely omits China’s lack of independent labor unions or the national security concern identified by Secretary Raimondo.

Harvard just got done with a big task force report on “institutional voice” about how Harvard institutionally was going to say neutral on policy issues, yet here is the central administration-published Harvard Gazette basically publishing a one-sided story based on the sketchy idea that the solution to climate change is for America to import more stuff from Communist China. Where were the editors?

Even judged by the yardstick “intellectual vitality,” another Harvard buzzword, there’s no sense from the Gazette article that various Harvard-affiliated scholars might have different views about how much of a priority to place on national security or labor rights versus climate change. There is a single tenured professor quoted in the whole story, an economist whose position is at the Kennedy School and who is not listed as a faculty member in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences economics department. At one point, the article lists as a possible reason in favor of tariffs the risk that a lack of tariffs might hurt U.S. autoworkers and thus elect Donald Trump: “In fact, harm to those companies and workers would have electoral repercussions severe enough that, on the nation’s deeply divided political landscape, they could tip the result toward an administration hostile to efforts to address climate change, Lee said.”

Anyway, Harvard can talk about institutional neutrality and intellectual vitality all it wants. Yet so long as community members keep reading articles like this in the central-administration-published Harvard Gazette—with no possibility of reader comments or letters to the editor—it’ll be readily visible how much room remains for further progress.