Editor's note: Jiang Wenran, a special commentator for CGTN, is the founding director of the China Institute and MacTaggart Research Chair emeritus at the University of Alberta. He is also an adviser at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The photo from South Africa's Rosslyn plant this month should travel far beyond Pretoria. On July 3, China's Chery Automobile took over the facility Nissan had run for nearly 60 years – the Japanese automaker's only African assembly anchor, a symbol of Tokyo's export-industrial reach, now handed to a Chinese firm.

Yet the factory itself is only part of the story. What really matters is what came with the handover. Chery kept all 692 existing workers, pledged millions to upgrade the line, and plans to turn the site into a regional research and development and export hub, with 3,000 new local jobs and a target of 100,000 annual sales across southern Africa by 2030.

This is not the "Chinese overcapacity dumping" story Western policymakers keep telling. It is a handoff. Nissan walked away because its African lineup, still weighted toward combustion, couldn't compete as the market tipped toward electric; Chery stepped in because it sees a 10-year opportunity. And Rosslyn is not an outlier. It is the latest marker of where the real global electric vehicles (EV) expansion is happening: not in the US, EU or Canada, where trade wars dominate headlines, but across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia – the very regions legacy automakers abandoned when the EV transition got messy.

The Middle East has become an increasingly important market for Chinese EV makers, underscoring the region's growing appetite for innovative, affordable and locally adapted transportation solutions.

The model is reaching North Africa too. In Egypt, BYD and Chery have opened talks for assembly partnerships to serve the Arab and Levant markets.

This pattern repeats across the Global South. In Thailand, Chinese brands took roughly 76% of the pure-electric market in 2025. Great Wall Motors took over General Motors' former Rayong plant; BYD built a new greenfield site nearby – both kept local workforces intact, same playbook as Rosslyn.

In Brazil, BYD is retooling Ford's former Camacari plant in Bahia, with investment expanded to $980 million and a 150,000-unit annual target, expected to create roughly 10,000 direct jobs for local sale and regional export. In Pakistan, Chery's Karachi-area assembly plant (via Master Auto Engineering) is ramping local content and training suppliers to make everything from wiring harnesses to seat foam – the same playbook, adapted to South Asian conditions.

The zero-sum framing, pushed by Washington and Brussels, that Chinese EV expansion hurts local economies does not hold up on the ground. Legacy Japanese and American automakers operated in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East for decades, but they repatriated most profits, transferred almost no core tech and walked away the moment their fuel-heavy models stopped selling.

Chinese makers are playing a longer game. They need steady markets for their supply chain surplus; but they also know those markets will only stick if they hire locally, adapt products to local conditions (dust-proofing for Sahel roads, enhanced air-conditioning for Gulf summers, cheap two-wheelers for South Asian last-mile delivery) and build local supplier ecosystems. It is not charity, nor is it anti-colonial posturing. It is enlightened self-interest – the same logic that drives energy projects under the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, China's port upgrades, and its 5G rollouts across the Global South: both sides get something tangible, with no political conditionality attached.

The hard truth the West keeps dodging is that China is now the undisputed global leader in EVs, batteries and the full downstream supply chain. Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) alone holds 37% of the global battery market; BYD sells more EVs and plug-in hybrids than any other firm; the entire chain from lithium processing to EV-grade chips is concentrated in Chinese clusters that iterate faster and cost less than any Western alternative.

The cost of not engaging that ecosystem, as Canada and the EU are slowly realizing, and as even the US is acknowledging through the US-China trade and investment working groups, is far higher than the cost of setting clear, locally tailored engagement rules.

Global South countries do not have to copy US bans or EU tariffs. They can write their own terms, as South Africa is doing with Chery: keep local jobs, set local content thresholds, require data sovereignty for local buyers and ask for tech transfer clauses in joint ventures. The import quota Canada negotiated with China, the local content rules Thailand imposed on Chinese EV makers, the joint venture requirements Saudi Arabia built into its BYD deal. These are all templates for making Chinese expansion a ladder.

Rosslyn's 60-year run as a Japanese industrial symbol ended not with a fight, but with a handshake. The Global South does not have to pick sides between Western protectionism and Chinese automakers' global push. It can take the investment, keep the jobs and leapfrog to clean transport without waiting for the US or Japan to care about its markets gains.

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