EV lock-in erodes the resilience of China’s battery value chain

Batteries underpin the energy transition, yet China’s EV market is slowing and increasingly volatile, raising concerns that shocks may spread across the battery value chain. Prior studies emphasize capacity scale or static chain mapping, offering limited evidence on nonlinear propagation and resilience limits. We compile 1.1 million interfirm transaction records to build a China Battery Value Chain Network covering 108 industries. We demonstrate a pronounced EV-locked configuration that concentrates demand absorption and forms a single-trunk topology for shock transmission. Further stress tests reveal a nonlinear survival threshold, where an 80 percent demand shock can drive output below a safety floor and sharply amplify cumulative losses and recovery delays under high EV dependence. We further find that circularity strengthens resilience only when it shifts flows to independent sinks such as grid-side storage. The implication is that battery value chain security must be engineered through demand diversification and pathway rewiring to keep the system away from tipping points, rather than pursued through expansion alone.