Welcome to the world of China’s lithium auctions, where vast numbers of bids are placed, firms end up spending over a thousand times the opening price, and buyers promising hundreds of millions of dollars have walked without paying.China is the biggest producer of electric vehicles and lithium is a key element in the batteries that power them. But the country holds just a fraction of the world’s identified reserves, which means it has to import over half of what it needs.The latest sales of licenses to mine the...