Will America’s withdrawal from the climate battle empower China?
The tech war is well underway – an expert looks at the climate competition
The Investigator | No. 04/2025
In 2017, Donald Trump, President of the United States (US), gave notice of his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Unwelcome though it was, it did not come as a surprise. Indeed, Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had clearly anticipated the move: he became the first Chinese leader to address the World Economic Forum (WEF), leading an 80-strong delegation of the PRC’s most prominent business executives and billionaires. Several of them, including Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Wang Jianlin, then chair of the property developer Dalian Wanda, have fallen out of favour since, but at the time Xi’s messaging was clear: the US is an unstable and unreliable partner. The PRC, on the other hand, will never renege on its international commitments and, however badly Washington behaved, Beijing would remain a steady friend.
There is some room for disagreement on whether the PRC always honours its international commitments: the 1984 Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, for instance, signed by London and Beijing, promised that Hong Kong’s way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years, a promise unceremoniously broken by the PRC in 2020 with the imposition of a draconian National Security Law. When challenged on this less than consistent approach to what is an international treaty, Chinese officials accused the UK of ‘despicably’ putting politics above the rule of law and insisted Britain had ‘no sovereignty, jurisdiction or right of supervision over Hong Kong after its return to the motherland.’
In that instance, Beijing appeared to be saying that it felt no obligation to honour a set of conditions that it considered unreasonable, notwithstanding its previous pledges, promises and commitments, a posture that might reasonably raise concerns about, for example, the PRC’s commitment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its protocols and agreements. Climate change commitments, however, are a different story for the PRC.
Beijing certainly bargains hard within the negotiating rooms of the UNFCCC in order to resist taking on mitigation targets that it would consider too onerous for what it argues is its continuing status as a developing country. But in contrast to Washington, there is no serious current of climate denialism in Beijing, and its experts and advisers are keenly aware of the country’s vulnerability to climate change: the PRC’s already severely water-stressed northern plain, its typhoon-vulnerable south, its rapidly depleting glaciers and uncertain monsoons, and its prosperous delta cities that must increasingly battle rising seas – these are all inescapable geographical realities which present serious risks to the economy and human security. The PRC’s prosperity, food security and liveability depend on the world avoiding dangerous climate change.
There is a further reason for Beijing to support the global energy transition and the climate. Beginning with the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), the PRC’s planner set an industrial course away from the high carbon, low added-value production which helped to fuel the first phases of its growth, and into the more advanced technologies that a world in transition away from fossil fuels requires, including solar and wind technologies, electric vehicles, nuclear plants, hydropower and battery technologies. In the course of building its industrial capacity in these sectors, the PRC also moved to secure the necessary supply chains. The result is that the PRC today holds a dominant position in the manufacture of low carbon goods and in the supply and processing of key inputs, including critical minerals, and its ability to manufacture at scale, combined with government support, has made it a formidable competitor on both quality and price.
The PRC, in effect, has bet its industrial future on selling low carbon goods to an increasingly carbon-constrained world. That market and the PRC’s future prosperity are intimately connected, and although Beijing will negotiate fiercely to ensure that any formal mitigation commitments do not impede its industrial or economic development, it needs the UNFCCC and its protocols and agreements to continue to function in order that the global demand for the PRC’s electric vehicles, solar panels and other goods will continue to grow.
This is not an entirely straightforward proposition, however. The world certainly needs the PRC’s low carbon technologies, but as the country has moved up the value chain; its industrial output increasingly threatens the industrial economies of Europe and the US. The European Union’s (EU) once promising solar industry was wiped out by Chinese competition and Brussels has now erected barriers to Chinese electric vehicles. Under Joe Biden, former President of the US, Chinese electric vehicles were effectively banned from the American market.
Given the interface between national security risks and trade concerns, these tensions were unlikely to diminish even before the return of Trump to the White House. The US market is likely to remain difficult and for the PRC, emerging economies which can afford to develop low carbon energy systems represent the least complicated economic and political opportunity.
The PRC is well placed to grasp that opportunity: for more than 20 years, it has cultivated trade and political relations across Africa and South America and now the return of Trump as US leader will give the PRC its greatest advantage in the contest for global influence. Successive US presidents have all but ignored Africa and in his first week in office, Trump has frozen all US foreign aid, while Elon Musk, his amanuensis, described the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a criminal organisation. Although the funding pause will supposedly last only 90 days – and is almost certainly illegal – Trump appears to want to abolish USAID altogether. The agency has a budget of more than US$50 billion (£40 billion) and has provided humanitarian assistance to developing countries since 1961. If Trump and Musk succeed, it will deal a further blow to US prestige in a majority world in which Beijing has been steadily building its influence.
By way of contrast, last month the leaders of more than half the countries of Africa met in Dar es Salaam to agree on a huge roll-out of solar power to a continent in which 600 million people currently have no access to electricity. The World Bank, the African Development Bank and others have pledged at least US$35 billion (£28 billion) in low-cost loans to fund solar development, including mini-grids. There is little doubt where the panels will come from. The PRC’s industrial investment over the past 20 years has brought down the cost of solar installations to the point that it now represents the fastest and cheapest way to bring energy access to would-be consumers in Africa.
Climate change will continue to play a critical role in the contest for global influence between Washington and Beijing as climate impacts and the costs of inaction mount. The PRC has been the world’s biggest emitter since 2005 and contributes relatively little to helping the rest of the world cope with climate impacts, both factors that have, on occasion, damaged the PRC’s standing with the G77 countries that it aspires to lead.
On the positive side of the balance, Xi pledged in September 2021 to build no further coal fired power stations outside the PRC. In contrast to the US, the PRC’s capacity to provide relatively low cost solutions to developing countries has been growing since then, along with the influence that will win.
Biden’s approach on climate change was to erect trade barriers to encourage the US to build its own, heavily subsidised, low-carbon industrial sector and speed up the transition to a low carbon energy system. Trump’s approach so far is to pledge to dismantle as much of that legacy as he can, while continuing to insist, as the rising seas lap around his ankles, that there is no such thing as climate change. In the contest for global influence on climate change, the PRC has a clear run for at least the next four years.
Isabel Hilton OBE is a member of the Advisory Council of the China Observatory at the Council on Geostrategy.
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