Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur eleifend tortor nec augue pretium
US president Donald Trump shocked the world when he described climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated” at the UN General Assembly in September, before going on to deride the “green energy scam”.
The next day, China’s leader Xi Jinping gave a surprise video statement to the New York summit announcing that the country would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10% by 2035 while "striving to do better".
While critics argue that China’s plan doesn’t go far enough, these contrasting announcements from the world’s two largest emitters left little doubt that the global order is changing, at least when it comes to political leadership on climate action.
In January, the US will once again officially withdraw from the Paris Agreement, having already instigated 145 actions to undo rules protecting clean air, water and climate within Trump’s first 100 days in office under his “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
Meanwhile, China continues to push ahead as the global leader on green technologies, accounting for 44% of the world’s total solar and wind power capacity and manufacturing 60-70% of all electric vehicles in 2024.
Below, associate professor in international development at the University of Bath, Dr Yixian Sun, explains the motivations behind China’s shift to renewables, its leadership ambitions, and how other nations should respond to its clean energy dominance.
The political system is China is very different from liberal democracies, but the legitimacy of the government comes from providing what the citizens want. In the 1990s during the reform era, up until around 2010, it was all about economic development, but then people started to realise the growing air pollution problem was a severe threat to public health. This was in the early days of social media, and when the data on air pollution was shown online, it went viral. China has a huge inequality issue, but even the wealthy big cities and coastal regions were struggling with severe pollution, and a lot of people were unhappy, including very powerful business people. The government realised that there are a lot of synergies between tackling air pollution and climate change, which was a big turning point for the county.
The important influence of him is really making this the top agenda of the government because he introduced this ‘ecological civilization’ concept where everything is connected to addressing environmental issues and the ‘two mountain theories’ where green mountains are also gold mountains. What he has done is actually put this at the top of the agenda and institutionalised it, making all the sub-national governments comply with the system.
Some of my colleagues were very disappointed, but people working in this area knew the target wouldn't be very high, and it was the first time the Chinese government made a commitment to set absolute emission reduction goals. Secondly, if we look at the projections, it's very likely China will overperform, and I think the government is trying to be very conservative to not over commit, because it’s against the culture of Chinese society.
The design of the Paris Agreement with nationally determined contributions (NDCs) is to always update them and then strengthen your actions. China is doing this in an incremental way, but I think we will see more ambitious targets in five years. The targets show tension between ambition and pragmatism, and are very much the Chinese style.
China has set up a very coherent ecosystem to support manufacturing and research and development (R&D) in clean technologies. Initially, there was a process of technology transfer and a learning process, because China didn't have the technology. But after working with foreign countries who did the design, it then adapted to mass production. We also have a well-educated workforce due to heavy government investment.
Some people would say it's about state capitalism, but for me, it's more about unifying different actors towards the same direction, which is partly because of the political system in China and a culture where people are used to collective thinking and collective action. In some other cultures or political systems, people tend to work in silos, which can cause a problem. Also, if you compare students from China and the UK, Chinese students tend to be more resilient because they are used to competition from a very young age.
It's very difficult. Every country wants to get economic benefits from this transition, and I think it seems like a zero-sum game to some people. Countries need to take a more cooperative approach, and think about what their role is in global value chains and where their comparative advantage is. There's no way to compete if you just follow the market principle, but you have to ask how this can benefit the rest of the world? Because the faster the transition, the better. There’s a lot of politicians who say, ‘we have to get back the control of the supply chains’, but I don't think China is seeking to use its dominance as economic statecraft to control others – measures to control rare earth exports have been mainly reactive to Trump’s tariffs. Instead of saying we need to compete against each other, we need to think about how we can collaborate and cooperate.
Some people would argue yes, because he’s basically given up, but I think others look at this from a more political-economy angle because his business and family have lots of connections to the fossil fuel industry. As a political scientist, I feel it's also about driving this huge divide between Republicans and Democrats, because a lot of people feel abandoned by the Democrats who introduced strong climate policies. In reality, this will be decided by what people can benefit from. For example, in Texas, if renewable prices are low, people still want to use solar, so in the end, I think people would make right choice if we set the right incentives.
During the pandemic, many local government decided to give permits to build these new coal power plants from an energy security perspective. But actually, if you look at the data, lots of plants were not fully used. It's a waste of money, because the economic incentive structure was wrong, and it sends a very wrong signal. There are still a lot of challenges in terms of how to really transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and China is only halfway through because it still largely relies on coal for electricity, but given the current speed that renewables have taken over in the last few years, I think the trajectory is very clear.
There has been lots of investment in very high-carbon sectors like coal-fired power plants and transportation projects; hard infrastructure, which have large environmental and social impacts. Sometimes it's also not very cost effective, and projects built by China didn’t get a return. There are a lot of debt issues as well, but since 2017 the Chinese government has started to promote a ‘Green Belt and Road Initiative’ shifting to renewables and clean energy.
We’ve done a lot of research into these renewable projects, for example, very large-scale solar farms in Indonesia, and trying to see if local communities actually benefit. Of course, the answer is always mixed, but China is trying to upgrade its standards for ESG in construction and how it approves finance. There are some positives that China can bring, especially because there's a gap in terms of infrastructure investment from multilateral development banks and western countries or traditional donors.
China's position is quite clear. It's always been part of the Global South, and even a leader in the block of G77+China. Now it is the largest emitter, so there's more expectations for it to provide more support to developing countries. But at the same time, China was a low-income country 30 years ago, and there is no clause in the UNFCCC on how you switch from developing to developed, so I think its identity is not going to change.
China has already become more active trying to bridge the gaps between developed and developing countries, especially when there are some deadlocks, for example, on climate finance, and I think it will start playing an even greater role because developing countries still view it as one of their peers.
The challenge is that sometimes China tries not to be too proactive, and ‘leadership’ is studied differently in China when compared to western cultures, and it doesn't want to act too strong as a leader, in that sense. It will definitely not act like the US as a superpower on leadership – that’s not the Chinese model. So it’s a very big conceptual question that I am trying to answer in my research: what kind of leadership can China offer to the world?
Chris Seekings is the Deputy Editor of ISEP’s Transform magazine, which is published biomonthly for ISEP members. Chris’s role involves writing sustainability-related news, features and interviews, as well as helping to plan and manage the magazine’s other day-to-day activities.
