NPR.

Earlier this week Ford said it was pausing a big new battery factory in Michigan.

And while the company didn't give a specific reason, it is happening in the middle of two major

controversies. Yeah, first there is the auto worker strike. The president of the United Automobile

Worker, Sean Fein called the factory pause a quote, shameful, barely veiled threat by four to cut

jobs. The second controversy is pre-strike. For that battery plant, Ford plant a license battery

making technology from a Chinese company. This has not been popular with Republican politicians,

especially if the plant was to be eligible for government subsidies. Earlier this year,

Republican Senator Marco Rubio wrote that this would quote, bring America's greatest geopolitical

adversary into the heartland. And so what do we know about this company? Well, it might be one of

the most important companies few Americans have heard of. It's called Contemporary Amperex

Technology Limited, or CATL. And it supplies batteries to more than a third of the world's

electric vehicles from Tesla to Volkswagen. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

And I'm Whelan Wong. Today in the show, the backstory to the most divisive factory plant in America

were replaying an episode about the history of CATL and the man charging the world's switch

to electric vehicles. It's a story of entrepreneurship and government support that turned electric

vehicles into a top industrial priority. At age 31, Zeng Yuchun decided to launch his own company

in the south of China. With an engineering degree and about a decade's electronics experience,

he had made small lithium ion batteries for portable devices like MP3 players. He named the

company Amperex Technology Limited, or ATL. But first, Yuchun needed the technology to make the

batteries. So he paid Bell Labs in the US a million dollars for a lithium ion battery patent.

But when he and his team got to making it, ATL found making a technology work was not as easy as

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