Monday, March 8, 2010, 9:42am PST | Modified: March 8, 2010, 9:42 AM

Clean tech forms new relationships with China (San Francisco)

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As San Francisco-based electric motorcycle startup Mission Motors looks for partners to help translate its technology into products for the mass market, it is shedding ideas long held about its closest cross-Pacific partner.

“Those of us who … have really seen China as a large source of manufacturing, now we’re looking at China as a potential customer, as a potential partner and as a potential investor even,” said Mission Motors CEO Jit Bhattacharya. “It was really a shift in thinking for us.”

Relationships between Chinese and U.S. companies are changing. That’s abundantly obvious in the cleantech sector, where China has become dominant not just as a cheap producer of products, but as a buyer, strategic investor and co-developer.

“I think China will be a formidable force in cleantech. Whether as a partner, a collaborator or a competitor. Any and all of the above,” said Ravi Viswanathan, a partner at Menlo Park venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates.

Read the full story in the San Francisco Business Times.