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<\/a><\/p>\nSource: Ember <\/a><\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n To speak of \u201covercapacity\u201d 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. <\/p>\n By the same token, it is also clearly true that China\u2019s green energy build-out is a \u201cpower move\u201d. China\u2019s 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\u2019s solar panels and batteries, the mainstream climate policy community is somewhat tongue-tied. <\/p>\n What kind of politics are at stake? The following is a bullet point answer to that question. A full discussion would take several books. <\/p>\n Clearly, first and foremost, the successful expansion of renewable power confers output legitimacy. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s greatest pollution disaster. Cleaning that up whilst delivering more and more electricity is a spectacular achievement of development. <\/p>\n Creating a world-leading new industry to produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and EV adds to the success. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n So this is not merely a matter of development in general, or ticking the boxes of the UN\u2019s SDR. China\u2019s green energy revolution confirms the CCP\u2019s stewardship. Specifically, it delivers on one of the personal mantra\u2019s of Xi Jinping:<\/p>\n \u7eff\u6c34\u9752\u5c71\u5c31\u662f\u91d1\u5c71\u94f6\u5c71<\/a> L\u01dc shu\u01d0 q\u012bngsh\u0101n ji\u00f9sh\u00ec j\u012bnsh\u0101n y\u00edn sh\u0101n Green Waters and Green Mountains <\/p>\n 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 \u201ctwo mountains theory,\u201d or liangshanlun (\u4e24\u5c71\u8bba), is part of the common parlance of modern Chinese politics.<\/p>\n The flip side of that dominant ideology is the silencing of any autonomous, rebellious environmental activism. <\/p>\n As Hong Zhang notes in a perceptive recent article in Made in China<\/a>, comparing the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo Hydropower Project with the highly controversial Three Gorges project of the 1990s and 2000s. <\/p>\n 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. \u2026 The Three Gorges Project\u2019s 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\u2019s 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). \u2026 In contrast, the LYT project\u2014with 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\u2014is moving ahead without a vote in the national legislature. It was simply decided and moved along China\u2019s bureaucratic process. In October 2020, the CCP\u2019s Nineteenth Congress passed its \u2018recommendations\u2019 for the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan covering the 2021\u201325 period, which included the \u2018implementation\u2019 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).<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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: \u201cThe world has been talking about green energy for decades. China is delivering.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s soft power, that the message is as muted as it is. <\/p>\n 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<\/a>, Beijing prefers to under promise. It is far too early too tell what subtle \u201csoft power\u201d effects will emanate from China\u2019s dominance of a new world of comprehensive electrification. <\/p>\n Propaganda channels aside, does the relatively muted celebration point to real issues, problems and concerns? <\/p>\n One issue is the fact that China may have succeeded too well. The competitive conditions in the PV industry are intense even by China\u2019s standards. <\/p>\n There is a difficult path ahead. Alongside the extraordinary expansion of green energy, China\u2019s coal build-out has also continued, though at much slower pace. The official rationale repeated in the most recent Ember report is \u5148\u7acb\u540e\u7834 Xi\u0101n l\u00ec h\u00f2u p\u00f2 (First establish, then dismantle.) aka \u201cBuild before break\u201d. This makes sense, but it cannot hide the tough struggles that are to come, as the coal sector is cut back. <\/p>\n The official propaganda that does go on around China\u2019s electrification is in many cases hard for global green narratives to assimilate, because it openly addresses Beijing\u2019s more or less coercive state-building in the \u201cWest\u201d, above all in Tibet and Xinjiang.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Source: Xu, Li-jun, et al. \u201cRenewable and sustainable energy of Xinjiang and development strategy of node areas in the \u201cSilk Road Economic Belt\u201d.\u201d <\/a>Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews<\/a> 79 (2017): 274-285.<\/a><\/p>\n 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 \u201cZollverein\u201d this is a political as well as an economic process. <\/p>\n Polysilicon production was ramped up in Xinjiang from 2016 when Beijing was in the midst of its crackdown on the Uighur population<\/a>. The use of forced labour<\/a> 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\u2019s demographic and socio-economic makeup. <\/p>\n China\u2019s massive hydropower schemes in Tibet<\/a> are not just sources of electricity and river control. They express Beijing\u2019s claim to power over the territory.<\/p>\n What is also clear is that wherever it takes place, whether in the West of China, or elsewhere, whether in China or abroad, China\u2019s green energy projects are fully part of an extractivist system<\/a> 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<\/a>, for the extraction of key raw materials like lithium, the designation of sacrifice zones etc. <\/p>\n Whatever, China\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n But extractivism does not equal extractivism. Each energy system is distinctive. Globally, China\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> is to free itself from overseas supplies, which may be closed by the forces of resource nationalism and \u201cderisking\u201d.<\/p>\n Conversely, clean electrification confers power on China as the supplier and operator of electric systems. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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<\/a> in the US, already in 2015 Xi Jinping endorsed the project of Global Energy Interconnection. <\/p>\n 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? <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n