Chartbook 414: Slouching towards (Red-Green) utopia. Voicing the muted politics of China's renewable energy revolution.
It can’t be said too often. The expansion of China’s green energy capacities and, in particular, its solar PV production capacity is world-changing. At this point, China alone already has 50 percent more production capacity for PV panels than is thought to be necessary to hit an “optimized” Net Zero trajectory for CO2 emissions. For those who don’t want to buy Chinese panels, if you add in the “rest of the world”, we have twice the capacity we need.
Source: Ember
To be clear, overshooting is nothing but good. Our models are approximate at best. Having more PV production capacity depresses the cost of expanding clean energy. It reduces the pressure on other slower-moving renewables like wind. It reduces the pressure to do difficult and expensive things to save energy. It will likely induce electricity-hungry innovation. China is already filing three times more clean energy patents than the rest of the world combined.
Beyond China, as the latest data from EMBER show, cheap renewables are allowing rapidly growing emerging markets to leapfrog the United States both in the degree of electrification and the share of renewables.
To speak of “overcapacity” should be unacceptable in light of the fact that 800 million people still lack basic access to electricity and 2 billion lack access to the means of clean cooking.
By the same token, it is also clearly true that China’s green energy build-out is a “power move”. China’s green energy revolution has a politics and how we talk about it is, therefore, inescapably political too. My sense is that on this point, for all our enthusiasm over China’s solar panels and batteries, the mainstream climate policy community is somewhat tongue-tied.
What kind of politics are at stake? The following is a bullet point answer to that question. A full discussion would take several books.
Clearly, first and foremost, the successful expansion of renewable power confers output legitimacy.
As recently as the early 2000s China was a chronically power-poor society. Answering that poverty with coal power was an achievement, but it created the world’s greatest pollution disaster. Cleaning that up whilst delivering more and more electricity is a spectacular achievement of development.
Creating a world-leading new industry to produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and EV adds to the success.
This is the achievement of millions of people of all ranks, of workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, of public and private agencies, but as Western observers insistently point out, there was a clear and well resourced industrial policy framework. Backhandedly even Western critics acknowledge Chinese government and party leadership.
So this is not merely a matter of development in general, or ticking the boxes of the UN’s SDR. China’s green energy revolution confirms the CCP’s stewardship. Specifically, it delivers on one of the personal mantra’s of Xi Jinping:
绿水青山就是金山银山 Lǜ shuǐ qīngshān jiùshì jīnshān yín shān Green Waters and Green Mountains [equal Mountains of Gold and Silver]
To an extent that is hard to exaggerate, over the last decade official green modernization has come to be identified with the Xi era. Invoking “two mountains theory,” or liangshanlun (两山论), is part of the common parlance of modern Chinese politics.
The flip side of that dominant ideology is the silencing of any autonomous, rebellious environmental activism.
As Hong Zhang notes in a perceptive recent article in Made in China, comparing the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo Hydropower Project with the highly controversial Three Gorges project of the 1990s and 2000s.
Throughout the 1980s, the Three Gorges Project was the subject of intense debate over its design, feasibility, and potential environmental and social impacts. These were genuine public debates in which opposing voices were heard. … The Three Gorges Project’s final approval in 1992 was shaped by the political aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Premier Li Peng, who played an instrumental role in authorising the military suppression of the protests, emerged politically empowered and used his position to champion the dam (Li 2003). The post-crackdown purge of liberal reformers within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cleared the way for Li to push the project through (RFI 2020). Despite that, when the Seventh National People’s Congress voted on the resolution to develop the project on 3 April 1992, 177 of the 2,633 deputies voted against it and 664 abstained (Xinhua 2009). … In contrast, the LYT project—with an investment cost five times greater and planned installation capacity three times greater than the Three Gorges Project, in a far more environmentally fragile and politically sensitive area—is moving ahead without a vote in the national legislature. It was simply decided and moved along China’s bureaucratic process. In October 2020, the CCP’s Nineteenth Congress passed its ‘recommendations’ for the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan covering the 2021–25 period, which included the ‘implementation’ of hydropower development on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo River (Xinhua 2020b). This was duly reflected in the Five-Year Plan released by the State Council the next year (NDRC 2021). In 2022, the project appeared in the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for Renewable Energy Development, framed as part of a plan to develop Southeast Tibet as a comprehensive base for hydro, wind, and solar energy (NDRC 2022a). In December 2024, the state news agency Xinhua announced that the project has been approved by the Chinese Government (Xinhua 2024). In March 2025, the project was included on the list of national priority projects to be launched within the year (NDRC 2025).
Of course, in their physical footprint, PV panels and EVs are not the same as a giant dam. They are being produced by private firms in highly competitive industries acutely sensitive to consumer demand. But it is undeniable that the panels, wind turbines and EV are also material manifestations of this official ideology of green modernization on the terms set by Beijing itself.
They materialize a vision of China. They are tokens of successfully fulfilling a promise. They also express a sense of collective achievement. They assert common agency: “The world has been talking about green energy for decades. China is delivering.”
Indeed, as far as green electrification is concerned, China can claim an undeniable, almost embarrassingly total claim to world leadership. And of course, this message is broadcast, but it is testimony to the relatively underdeveloped quality of China’s soft power, that the message is as muted as it is.
Imagine if the Biden administration had done anything remotely comparable. Imagine an AI-scale hype bubble around American green energy. Imagine a world with half a dozen Teslas. Imagine if the IRA had actually been a world-transforming policy. By contrast, as Li Shuo recently pointed out in the NYT, Beijing prefers to under promise. It is far too early too tell what subtle “soft power” effects will emanate from China’s dominance of a new world of comprehensive electrification.
Propaganda channels aside, does the relatively muted celebration point to real issues, problems and concerns?
One issue is the fact that China may have succeeded too well. The competitive conditions in the PV industry are intense even by China’s standards.
There is a difficult path ahead. Alongside the extraordinary expansion of green energy, China’s coal build-out has also continued, though at much slower pace. The official rationale repeated in the most recent Ember report is 先立后破 Xiān lì hòu pò (First establish, then dismantle.) aka “Build before break”. This makes sense, but it cannot hide the tough struggles that are to come, as the coal sector is cut back.
The official propaganda that does go on around China’s electrification is in many cases hard for global green narratives to assimilate, because it openly addresses Beijing’s more or less coercive state-building in the “West”, above all in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Energy planning in China is explicitly conceived as spatial planning. This has a technological component and has driven remarkable innovations in long-range ultra high voltage power transmission.
Source: Xu, Li-jun, et al. “Renewable and sustainable energy of Xinjiang and development strategy of node areas in the “Silk Road Economic Belt”.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 79 (2017): 274-285.
At one and the same time this macroregional energy planning is also a power play to integrate the far flung territories of the Chinese nation state. As energy bases are expanded in the West and power is sent Eastwards, industrialization and (Han) settlers move to the Western territories. The integration of China as a giant national economic unit is one of the most basic processes driving its spectacular growth over the last two generations. As with any “Zollverein” this is a political as well as an economic process.
Polysilicon production was ramped up in Xinjiang from 2016 when Beijing was in the midst of its crackdown on the Uighur population. The use of forced labour caught Western attention in the early 2020s, but the larger point is that centrally directed economic development is itself a program of incorporation and induces profound and irreversible change in Xinjiang’s demographic and socio-economic makeup.
China’s massive hydropower schemes in Tibet are not just sources of electricity and river control. They express Beijing’s claim to power over the territory.
What is also clear is that wherever it takes place, whether in the West of China, or elsewhere, whether in China or abroad, China’s green energy projects are fully part of an extractivist system of development. Indeed, Chinese energy policy in general over the last half century ought to be understood as the culmination (to date) of that entire historic drama. Never before have so many people undergone such rapid development in such a concentrated and material-intensive form. If the shift to wind, solar and batteries are the next stage of that development process, then once again China is doing it on a scale and pace never before seen. This unarguably has huge implications for land use, for the extraction of key raw materials like lithium, the designation of sacrifice zones etc.
Whatever, China’s authoritarian environmentalism may be, it is not a break with the basic premise that large-scale organized modernity requires the subordination of natural resources and the irreversible incorporation of traditional and indigenous communities into what Beijing sees as the common national and human project of modernization.
But extractivism does not equal extractivism. Each energy system is distinctive. Globally, China’s green electrification push is a power move also in the sense that it has the potential to render obsolete large parts of the existing fossil fuel system. In the first instance the green energy push displaces coal, but China will likely never emerge as a major consumer of gas and in due course transport electrification will displace oil consumption too. The footprint of China’s green energy system is still very much in flux. It has huge influence over raw materials mining and refining, but it is also responding to external pressures. Part of the reason that China is pushing lithium development in Tibet is to free itself from overseas supplies, which may be closed by the forces of resource nationalism and “derisking”.
Conversely, clean electrification confers power on China as the supplier and operator of electric systems.
China no doubt expands its global reach, influence and presence, whether it is the provider of dirty coal-fired power stations under the original BRI or of solar panels and batteries under BRI 2.0.
China state grid has visions of large-scale interconnection that are continental in reach. As has not escaped the attention of observers like the RAND think tank in the US, already in 2015 Xi Jinping endorsed the project of Global Energy Interconnection.
Furthermore, an electrostate is by definition one with a network power. Since May 2025, thanks to a report by Reuters, there has been much discussion of the possibility that Chinese-supplied inverters - the boxes that convert DC power coming from solar panels and wind turbines to AC current for the grid - may have undeclared communications equipment that allow them to be remote-controlled. Does installing a cheap Chinese solar panel give Beijing a kill switch?
Source: Cleantechnica
The story has not evolved much since May, but serves as a reminder of what might be at stake.
This is not a definitive list of issues. Nor do I have a simple prescription for how to address the many questions that are implied. But, as someone committed to the project of global green modernization and the energy transition, warts and all, I am certain we should be thinking and talking about them. The national security hawks have no difficulty in raising their concerns. The degrowth/anti-extractivist camp claims to know what it thinks, too. In many case the preferred strategy for “team energy transition” seems to be to mute the politics and simply trumpet the extraordinary things being achieved by Chinese policy. The advantages of adopting this kind of neutralization are obvious. You avoid controversy. But so too are the risks. As hardly needs saying, I don’t advocate confrontation. But if our conclusion is that détente-style, peaceful co-existence and cooperation is the only viable option then let us at least be explicit about what we are advocating and think through constructive pressure points for confidence-building and intervention.
We have at this point to start by acknowledging the collapse of any Western claim to leadership in the global project of green modernization (such as that was). And so our task now is to make the best of the situation. And yes I do have some concrete examples in mind of things we might do, but those are for another post.
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The topic of green energy is a frequent flier in our home. I appreciate your clarity, and look forward to your thoughts on things we might do as next steps.
I am continually amazed at the current administration's claim of a green energy hoax while concurrently claiming a desire to increase manufacturing and provide the necessary energy resources to support increasing demand. It appears that in addition to China's internal requirements, like a good capitalist, they recognize an economic opportunity. Great article!