The green industrialisation race is unfolding within a transformed geopolitical landscape, marked by intensifying great-power competition, the fragmentation of multilateral trade governance, and China’s emergence as the world’s leading producer of electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, and other clean technologies. As Chinese firms increasingly globalise the production of these technologies through overseas manufacturing investment, new opportunities are emerging for developing countries to access advanced low-carbon technologies and pursue industrial upgrading. Yet we know relatively little about how China’s rise as a leading green technology power reshapes these opportunities. While the technology transfer literature has traditionally explained variation in outcomes through domestic absorptive capacity, industrial policy, and foreign investor motivations, it was largely developed in the context of a relatively unipolar international order. As a result, it pays limited attention to how changing geopolitical conditions shape host-country bargaining power and, ultimately, the terms under which technology is transferred.
This paper develops an integrated framework that brings together the domestic determinants of technology transfer with the geopolitics of great-power competition, arguing that outcomes are jointly shaped by host-country bargaining power, set by a country’s position within an increasingly multipolar world, and domestic capacity to convert negotiated commitments into technological upgrading. We first map Chinese low-carbon foreign direct investment (FDI) across Latin America, then examine the framework through an in-depth case study of BYD’s electric vehicle manufacturing operations in Camaçari, Brazil. We find that geopolitical fragmentation expanded Brazil’s bargaining space, enabling it to negotiate rising local-content commitments and the joint engineering of a flex-fuel powertrain adapted to Brazilian conditions. Yet these gains remained partial: BYD retained control over its core battery and software technologies, limiting greater technological transfers. The paper concludes that multipolarity expands the range of outcomes developing countries can negotiate with Chinese investors, but it is domestic industrial policy and enforcement capabilities that determines how much of that opportunity is ultimately realised.