Rather than taking up the mantle of "climate leadership", China is walking a mundane path to global transformation.
"When many people pass one way, a road is made." - Lu Xun
In June 2010, former vice president and newly minted Nobel Laureate, Al Gore, arrived in Beijing to launch his Climate Project. In a ballroom at the China World Hotel in the city’s central business district, Gore delivered his famous slideshow on the climate crisis to an audience of 300 Chinese officials, business executives, NGO leaders and citizen volunteers. For nearly eight hours, he moved in his easy southern drawl from one arresting image to the next: glaciers collapsing, polar bears dying, mountainsides crumbling and bridges falling, explaining along the way how those gathered could use the slides to persuade others of the urgency of climate change.
After each section of the more than 150-slide presentation, Gore opened to the floor for questions. And each time he did so, almost everyone asked a version of the exact same question: we know the problem, but what is the solution? Gore had little to offer beyond vague invocations of wind and solar. He had come to teach the Chinese how to communicate the problem of climate change. His audience, however, wanted to know how to solve it.
There is a phrase that appears everywhere in Western discourse on climate and almost nowhere in China’s: “climate leadership”. As soon as the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the remaining global superpower, China, was expected to take up the mantle of leadership on climate change. That pressure on China to fill the vacuum intensified when the US did not attend the UN climate summit for the first time last year, with a Washington Post headline crowning China “the world’s climate champion”, and California’s governor lamenting that America was ceding its leadership to the country.
Yet, as the talks closed, commentators began to register their disappointment. In the summit’s negotiating rooms, Chinese delegates had kept their heads down, and they had resisted stronger language in the final agreement. China’s new climate pledge, meanwhile, known as NDC 3.0 in reference to the third generation of the Paris Agreement’s Nationally Determined Contributions, was modest. To many analysts, it was clear that rather than emerging as the world’s climate champion, China had declined to fill the role vacated by the US. As a New York Times headline read: “China offers panda totes, but no new commitments.”
China’s reticence to accept “climate leadership” has puzzled many observers. After all, shouldn’t it be pleased that, after the Century of Humiliation and years of being lectured about its smokestacks and “airpocalypses”, the world now calls it a leader? And, by any material measure, China does indeed lead the global energy transition. It installs more solar and wind each year than the rest of the world combined. It builds most of the planet’s batteries and electric vehicles (EVs). And it has driven the price of clean power down so far that decarbonization has become affordable for countries around the world. So what’s wrong with “leadership”?
Yet those in the West who are fond of asking “Can China lead?” seldom ask whether that is actually what China wants. In our conversations with Chinese experts, it has always been clear that China has little appetite for leadership as Americans like Al Gore understand it: sounding the alarm, setting the agenda, making the boldest pledges, holding the pen that drafts agreements. “Westerners talk about leadership like it’s a good thing”, a former climate negotiator said in the early 2000s. “We Chinese prefer to be neither the leader nor the laggard—we like to be in the middle.”
Whether they like it or not, the middle—that refuge from both accolade and acrimony—has not lasted long. Over the past decade, China has been thrust into two seemingly contradictory roles at once: both the world’s largest annual contributor to climate change and its supposed new leader in fighting it. How do we understand this contradiction? And what exactly is China’s plan?
Our answer will sit uneasily with both China’s admirers and its critics. China has no plan. There is no grand strategy for planetary decarbonization, no long game to lead the collective struggle. What China has instead is something that may ultimately matter more: a sprawl of largely uncoordinated actors—experts, manufacturers, ministries, municipalities and provinces—each pursuing its own passions and interests, but together doing more to slow climate change than any of them intended. Almost none these actors set out to save the planet. They simply dealt with the problem in front of them.
China has trekked a mundane path, but in a world of summit theatre and broken targets, mundanity may just be what we need.
An education
In June 1992, a Chinese delegation arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit where, alongside more than 150 other nations, it signed a new Framework Convention on Climate Change. The summit took place just three years after the international backlash over Tiananmen, and China was eager to show that it could be a good citizen of the world. Even so, nobody in Rio, least of all the Chinese, imagined that China would one day sit at the centre of the climate question. The country’s economy was then one-fifteenth the size of America’s, and its emissions a fraction of America’s and Europe’s. It cost little, therefore, to throw its full support behind the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”—the idea that all nations share a duty to act on climate change, but rich countries, which had contributed most to the problem and possessed most of the means, should act first and do more.
In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), and its economy went into overdrive. To meet the resulting surge in demand for electricity, coal plants multiplied. In 2006, China overtook the US as the world’s largest annual emitter. Just two years later, during the Olympic Games in Beijing, the city’s air pollution—famously visible from space—dominated the coverage, while “China builds a new coal-fired power plant every week” became a fixture of Western editorials. The country that had been a bystander at Rio barely a decade and a half earlier was now the world’s designated polluter.
The learning curve was steep. One of China’s senior climate policy figures told us that sometime around 2000 they received a phone call from the president’s office. Someone very high up, it seemed, had been reading policy proposals and had a question: what, exactly, was carbon sequestration? A leadership consumed by state enterprise reform and rural poverty had not yet needed a word for burying carbon, but the education had begun. Shortly after coming to power in 2003, Hu Jintao convened a group of 12 top experts in climate science, economics and technology to advise him on what China should do about climate change.
A mistake
Every education includes mistakes. China’s came in Copenhagen in December 2009, and it is worth retelling because almost everyone remembers it wrong.
In the weeks before the summit, China, India and the United States announced relatively ambitious emissions-reduction targets—a genuine breakthrough that should have set the negotiators up for a successful meeting. Then came a show of American toughness. On his way to Copenhagen, US envoy Todd Stern intimated that China’s commitments did not go far enough, and that nothing would be accomplished unless developing countries such as China and India stepped up. Stern was posturing for a domestic audience: he knew full well the Senate would never ratify the binding targets he was demanding from China. But the Chinese, who had just stepped up, did not parse the performance. They were livid.
From there the summit descended into duelling press conferences and a farce over the word “binding”: the Americans demanding a legal structure they could never enact; the Chinese insisting on non-binding targets, arguing, in effect, for the only architecture the US could actually deliver. Throughout, the world’s two largest emitters talked past each other while the world watched and assigned blame. Most of it landed on China, whose delegates flew home branded the wreckers of Copenhagen.
In fairness, Copenhagen wasn’t a total failure. Beyond new commitments from the US, China and India, the summit’s memorandum marked the first time that the world had rallied around a specific limit on warming: 2ºC, a figure that sounded reasonable at the time. And the lessons Beijing drew from the experience were formative. First: exposure was dangerous. The multilateral arena was a place where China could do substantively more than it had ever been able to before and still get pilloried. Second: international climate negotiations ran on language, theatrics and a legal order made in the West. As one veteran of the process put it to us candidly: “I can understand the language, but I cannot write it myself.” China concluded that it was not suited for the pen-holding kind of leadership. The instinct that resulted—talk less, do more—frustrates those who want inspiring speeches and ambitious pledges. But it may also be the key to understanding China’s answer to climate change.
Out of the wreckage also emerged an unlikely realization in both Washington and Beijing: neither state could address climate change without the other. The half dozen years that followed saw the most intense period of climate cooperation between the two countries, which together began churning out joint patents and research papers. It also created a shared language for climate action that would eventually make Paris possible. There, in December 2015, the world signed an agreement that everyone could buy into and work with, built on a revised understanding of “common but differentiated responsibilities” that edged closer to “from each according to his abilities”. That moment of accord famously collapsed just two years later, when Washington announced its withdrawal from the Agreement.
Observers braced themselves for Beijing to follow, or at least to ease its effort. Instead, it did the opposite. The late 2010s became a period of vigorous environmental regulation in China, culminating in the incorporation of “ecological civilization” into the state constitution in 2018, placing environmental protection at the core of the state’s responsibilities. At the UN General Assembly in 2020, Xi announced that China would peak its emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060—a pledge made with no American counterpart.
There is no single China. There are only people and institutions—a farmer, an entrepreneur, a scientist, a city, a province, a ministry—each pursuing its own interests, each a little stream obeying its own gradient. Over the past two decades, these streams have gathered into a series of rivers which ultimately joined in a single current: the greening of China’s—and, by extension, the world’s—economy. In retrospect, the confluence can look as though it had been coordinated all along. It wasn’t. There was no masterplan.
We can see how those unguided streams joined the great confluence of the energy transition by following the route of three of them: the scrubbers; the cars and the panels; and the scientists.
The scrubbers
Some of us still remember the January 2013 “airpocalypse”, when Beijing’s smog blew past the top of the US Embassy’s PM2.5 monitor—reading 30 times the World Health Organization guideline for particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less. International condemnation matched domestic fury and, for a stretch, air and water pollution dominated both the official news and Chinese social media. The government responded with force—at times, too much of it. In 2017, a campaign ordered millions of northern factories and households off coal heating before the replacement gas had arrived or could be afforded. The policy was reversed after reports emerged of children freezing in unheated schools.
But China’s war on pollution did not begin with the airpocalypse. As early as 2003, China had raised its pollution standards, requiring flue gas desulphurization equipment, or “scrubbers”, on every coal-fired power plant, a retrofit largely carried out between 2007 and 2009. In 2011, the standards tightened again, demanding still greater sulphur removal and imposing new limits on nitrogen oxides. Just as important, every coal plant was fitted with continuous emissions monitors, allowing regulators to see, in real time, what was coming out of each smokestack. The equipment took a few years to install and operate properly, but the results eventually became visible. Air pollution peaked sometime between 2011 and 2013—at the height of its global attention—and then declined steadily over the following decade. In the decade from 2014 to 2024, average PM2.5 concentrations across China fell by more than a third, from 49.1 to 31.3 micrograms per cubic metre.
The scrubbers themselves did nothing for the climate—if anything, they required a little extra energy to run. But the war on pollution introduced emissions reduction and energy efficiency as guiding principles for energy use. It also made every energy source that produced no smog—like hydro, wind, solar and nuclear—instantly more attractive. And each of these, as it happened, also produced virtually no carbon. In cleaning the air, the government had given itself a reason to favour the technologies that the climate needed.
When the blue skies returned, China had accomplished, almost by accident, its first great act of climate mitigation.
The cars and the panels
Another bet with enormous consequences was made in 2001, years before the country had to worry seriously about climate treaty commitments. Then, Chinese policymakers surveying the automobile industry reached a sober conclusion: in internal combustion, they would never catch up with the Germans and Americans. In hybrids, meanwhile, the Japanese lead already seemed insurmountable. There was, however, one race that had barely begun. So, they made a decision based on pure industrial logic: skip the crowded field entirely and leapfrog to electric vehicles.
Soon, China was embarking on a haphazard programme of extensive subsidies (often from local governments competing against one another), mass procurement, charging infrastructure build-out and rapid advances in battery technology, which together propelled China to the forefront of the technology that is now decarbonizing transportation across the world.
Two decades ago, BYD was a battery maker that barely registered as a carmaker; last year, it overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV manufacturer, outselling it in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. Today, a Brazilian family’s first EV is more likely to be a BYD than anything made in Detroit, Stuttgart or Fremont. The climate benefits have been enormous, but it was never a climate plan.
If EVs were a deliberate bet, solar was not. China’s solar industry began its life as an export business, scarcely different from toys, garments or electric fans. After entering the WTO, Chinese factories answered every export order, solar panels being one of them. Before the 2008 financial crisis, the government paid the sector no particular attention. Then came the crash, which vaporized the solar export market. Jiangsu province, facing the collapse of a local industry, began requiring and rewarding solar on its own buildings and grids. The result was a domestic market, later scaled by national policy and ferocious competition, that drove the price of solar electricity down by roughly 90 per cent and changed the arithmetic of energy for every country on Earth.
In pursuit of ordinary business, Chinese companies had accomplished, almost by accident, another great act of climate mitigation.
The scientists
Qin Dahe, China’s foremost glaciologist and meteorologist, was born two years before the People’s Republic itself. A commanding presence at well over six feet, he is charismatic and easy to listen to. In 1989, he crossed Antarctica by dogsled—a seven-month, 6,000-kilometre traverse with an American explorer, a French doctor, a Soviet scientist and dog handlers from Japan and Britain. Every 50 kilometres, Qin stopped to collect snow samples, the only member of the six-man team conducting systematic scientific research along the way. The ice record he hauled across the continent became the foundation of a career that eventually took him to the head of China’s Meteorological Administration and, for a decade, to the co-chairmanship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical-science working group, where he led the assessments that sharpened the world’s understanding of what warming would actually do. In 2007, he stood in Oslo as part of the IPCC delegation receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the early 2000s, Qin began publicly saying that climate change would be bad for China. This had not always been obvious. Through the 1990s, the models spoke confidently about melting tundra in the far north but were blurry about the mid-latitudes, including China. There was even a plausible argument that extra carbon dioxide, acting as a fertilizer, might boost Chinese harvests. Only with the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001 did the picture sharpen: whatever the extra carbon gave the crops would be swamped by floods stripping topsoil and droughts cracking fields. Chinese scientists were watching the confirmation arrive in real time.
In 2004, when a typhoon battered the Chinese coast, Qin went on China Central Television’s seven o’clock news—the most watched broadcast in the country—to explain to hundreds of millions of viewers what was happening to their weather. As the impacts mounted, with shifting typhoons, harsher droughts and floods that regularly drowned subway systems, climate change migrated in official thinking from a matter of diplomatic courtesy to one of domestic security.
In pursuing his passion for ice, Qin and scientists like him deepened our understanding of climate change and, in doing so, accomplished China’s third great act of climate mitigation. They were not cogs of a national climate machine, but individuals whose work and convictions helped shape the climate agenda at both the national and global levels.
A Chinese answer to climate change
Conventional narratives about China and climate change hold that China reluctantly moves when the world pushes. On climate, international pressure has surely mattered. From Rio to Paris, foreign governments, foundations and NGOs cajoled, shamed and persuaded. This year, European carbon border taxes have forced efficiency upgrades throughout Chinese supply chains of the kind that domestic policy alone would not have compelled. But China was never a passive recipient of international pressure, a slacking student doing the minimum to avoid the teacher’s scolding. The three rivers traced above were flowing for reasons of their own: citizens wanted clean air, companies wanted to sell, scientists wanted answers.
A Chinese answer to climate change began from demonstration rather than declaration. A wind executive we recently spoke to used California as an example. “When California pioneered renewables, it never announced itself as a leader”, they told us. “It just did the thing, and the world came to look.” China’s strongest case is the same—not its rhetoric but its record: the energy transformation of a vast, coal-dependent, middle-income country, whose green industries now pull its economy rather than drag it, and whose pledges are boring precisely because they are kept.
At this, the world is looking. In Nepal last year, three out of four new vehicles sold were electric—an obvious choice for a landlocked country that trucks in every drop of its oil but sits on nearly unlimited hydropower. This was made possible by Chinese EVs, which are cheap enough for Nepali wallets. In Pakistan, households and businesses, tired of a grid that fails daily, have chosen renewables without any government inducement: solar imports doubled year on year until last year Pakistan joined the “25 per cent club”, the handful of countries now drawing more than a quarter of their power from the sun. Cheap Chinese panels and batteries made the transformation possible. South Africa, Africa’s biggest importer of solar panels, is following the same path.
Parts of the world, in other words, are already upgrading their energy systems faster than decades of summit diplomacy could compel them to. As one Chinese expert put it to us this past summer, for developing countries “the negotiations only bring negative issues.” Better, he argued, to supply these countries directly with the technologies they need than to spend years haggling over financing commitments that amount, in his word, to “peanuts”.
Technology diffusion should therefore be China’s core offer. This is the genuinely irreplaceable thing China brings to the table: not moral authority, but a recipe that has made decarbonization affordable for the first time. The task is to convert this from a trade grievance into a global public good: to transfer manufacturing prowess and not just products, and to accept, as one Chinese scholar told us bluntly, that “you cannot take such a big share of the market; everyone must have a fair share of the pie.”
This process is already beginning: BYD now has factories in Thailand, Hungary and Brazil, while Goldwind has plants in Turkey and Brazil. A wave of Chinese investment is following the products abroad, much as post-war America sent its manufacturers around the world and 1980s Japan brought its car plants to Thailand and Tennessee. In its wake come not only cheap green technologies but factories, supply chains and jobs. More than 500 million Africans still lack electricity: Chinese capital and kit could plausibly close that gap within a decade.
None of this requires China to say the phrase it carefully avoids: “climate leadership”. It requires China to keep doing what it has, half-accidentally, been doing all along—but to do it now with more purpose: to walk its mundane path to the end. For 30 years the world has been asking for China’s plan. The honest answer, for all the country’s penchant for planning, is that there never was one. As Lu Xun, father of modern Chinese literature, wrote a century ago: “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way, a road is made.”
Iza Ding is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.
Deborah Seligsohn is Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University.