by Carlos Martinez
It was reported in late June 2025 that China has reached a historic milestone in its energy transition: the country’s cumulative installed solar capacity has surpassed 1 terawatt (TW). This represents approximately 45 percent of the global total, and is several times higher than the figure for the US (177 gigawatts (GW)) and the European Union (269 GW).
According to the latest figures released by China’s National Energy Administration (NEA), the nation’s total installed capacity of wind and solar photovoltaic power has reached 1.5 TW, outstripping thermal power for the first time. This achievement solidifies China’s status as the world’s only renewable energy superpower, and reflects its firm commitment to phasing out its use of fossil fuels.
Ecological civilisation
This progress is a manifestation of China’s programme of ecological civilisation, which promotes balanced and sustainable development directed towards the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature, and which has led to China emerging as the undisputed global leader in renewable energy, biodiversity protection, forestation, pollution reduction and sustainable transport .
China’s strategy is based on an understanding that, in the words of President Xi Jinping, “humankind can no longer afford to ignore the repeated warnings of nature and go down the beaten path of extracting resources without investing in conservation, pursuing development at the expense of protection, and exploiting resources without restoration”.
China is therefore working feverishly towards its ambitious long-term emissions targets, announced at the UN General Assembly in 2020: to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030, and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
According to a detailed analysis by Carbon Brief, the goal of peaking emissions has already been reached. China’s emissions were down 1.6 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025, even as overall electricity demand continued to grow.
In an essay for the New York Times titled ‘America Is Losing the Green Tech Race to China’, David Wallace-Wells, prominent journalist and author of The Uninhabitable Earth, describes China’s role in the global green-tech supply chain: “China produces 84 percent of the world’s solar modules… It produces 89 percent of the world’s solar cells and 97 percent of its solar wafers and ingots, 86 percent each of its polysilicon and battery cells, 87 percent of its battery cathodes, 96 percent of its battery anodes, 91 percent of its battery electrodes and 85 percent of its battery separators. The list goes on.”
The necessary counterpart to the rise of clean energy is the steady decline of coal’s share of China’s power mix. At the beginning of the 21st century, around 80 percent of China’s electricity was generated from coal; by May 2024 it was down to 53 percent, and is falling fast.
While it’s true that China continues to build new coal-fired power plants, these tend to be modern, cleaner and more efficient replacements for existing plants. US-based analysts KJ Noh and Michael Wong note that the bulk of China’s coal plants are now advanced supercritical or ultra-supercritical plants, “which means they are much more efficient and cleaner than many of the industrial-era legacy plants of the US” (‘China offers solutions to climate change’, Asia Times, 12 November 2021).
Furthermore, many of the coal plants planned or under construction will act in a reserve capacity to ensure reliability of supply from solar and wind power plants. A 2023 Telegraph article notes that the approval of new coal plants “does not mean what many in the West think it means. China is adding one GW of coal power on average as back-up for every six GW of new renewable power. The two go hand in hand” (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ‘China’s CO2 emissions may be falling already, in a watershed moment for the world’, 21 November 2023).
China’s sustained investment in renewable energy has meant a global reduction in costs, such that in much of the world, solar and wind power are increasingly price-competitive with fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s huge investment in green energy has “contributed to a cost decline more than 80 percent, helping solar PV to become the most affordable electricity generation technology in many parts of the world”.
Global crisis
It is by now almost universally understood that humans need to transition away from fossil fuels and adopt renewable energy if we are to avoid catastrophic levels of climate change. As Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data, says:
“Global temperatures are rising. Sea levels are rising; ice sheets are melting; and other species are struggling to adapt to a changing climate. Humans face an avalanche of problems from flooding and drought to wildfires and fatal heatwaves. Farmers are at risk of crop failures. Cities are at risk of being submerged. There’s one main cause: human emissions of greenhouse gases” (Not the end of the world How we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet, Chatto & Windus, London, 2024).
The science is clear and widely accepted: human activity, most importantly the burning of fossil fuels, has increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to an unprecedented level. This has led to more heat being trapped within the Earth’s atmosphere (that is, less heat is being radiated back into space), resulting in a global heating effect, which leads to more frequent and severe weather events, rising sea levels, and shifts in ecosystems.
Greenhouse gas concentration will continue to increase, and the corresponding ecological problems will get significantly worse, unless we either reduce our consumption of energy to an extraordinary degree or we switch to non-emitting forms of energy. The idea of reducing humanity’s overall energy consumption is obviously not plausible in a global context where billions of people need to consume more energy in order to meet their development needs.
The only realistic option for preventing climate breakdown is to undertake a massive global transition to green energy: to meet humanity’s energy needs without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and without causing permanent damage to the environment.
Why China?
Since the early 1990s there has been a global consensus on the need to urgently transition to green energy, and yet the advanced capitalist countries have made precious little progress in this regard. Indeed, these countries maintain fossil fuel subsidies, they continue to expand drilling for oil and gas, and of course they engage in ecologically ruinous military activities. Inasmuch as they have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, it has been achieved largely through exporting industry to manufacturing powerhouses abroad – principally China.
Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel writes: “The past half-century is littered with milestones of inaction. A scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change first began to form in the mid-1970s… The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 1992 to set non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. International climate summits – the UN Congress of Parties – have been held annually since 1995 to negotiate plans for emissions reductions. The UN framework has been extended three times, with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. And yet global CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, while ecosystems unravel at a deadly pace” (Less is more, How de-growth will save the world, Extinction Rebellion, 2020).
For decades they have told us that mysterious market forces will fix the environmental crisis. When the dynamics of supply and demand fail to perform their magic, the capitalist class attempts to shift blame on to individual consumers, who are expected to reduce their domestic energy consumption, to avoid flying, to recycle, to take shorter showers, to drive electric cars, to eat less meat and so on. The crisis is thereby, in typical neoliberal fashion, individualised, and the capitalist system is absolved of all responsibility.
What China’s leadership in environmental matters shows is that socialism is the only viable political and economic framework for saving the planet.
Public ownership, China’s democratic planning system, the absence of any meaningful fossil fuel lobby, and the location of political power in the working people have all allowed China to make far more rapid progress than the other major powers in relation to environmental protection and sustainable development.
China’s economic system is structured in such a way that political and economic priorities are determined not by capital’s drive for constant expansion but by the needs and aspirations of the people. Xi Jinping has pointed out several times that, in economic terms, the great advantage of China’s socialist system is that it allows the country to mobilise tremendous resources in order to accomplish major initiatives. The government, state-owned enterprises, cooperative and private companies all work together in the shared ecosystem of a socialist market economy, regulated by the state and adhering to a high-level plan. The largest banks are state-owned, meaning that the most important decisions concerning allocation of capital are made in the long-term interests of the people, not in the short-term interests of capital.
The US, Britain, EU and Canada are talking the talk; China is walking the walk. As John Bellamy Foster has observed: “While China has made moves to implement its radical conception of ecological civilization, which is built into state planning and regulation, the notion of a Green New Deal has taken concrete form nowhere in the West. It is merely a slogan at this point without any real political backing within the system. It was talked about by progressive forces and then rejected by the powers that be” (John Bellamy Foster, Jianren Guo, Zhang Haiyan and Fan Meijun, ‘Why is the great project of Econological Civilization specific to China?’, MR Online, 1 October 2022).
To reiterate, the fundamental reason China has emerged as the undisputed leader in the fight against climate breakdown is its socialist system. However, the whole world, and particularly developing countries, can benefit from China’s innovations in renewable energy and electric transport. And for those of us in the advanced capitalist countries, where political power is dominated by a decaying bourgeoisie, China’s example can be used to help create mass pressure to stop our governments and ruling classes from destroying the planet, and to encourage sensible cooperation with China on environmental issues.
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