The real reason behind China’s climate activism

In the fight against climate change, China loves to present itself as the world’s White Knight. Armed with wind turbines and solar panels, EVs and batteries, it will rescue us from oblivion if only we would let it. 

There’s no shortage of western politicians, academics and organizations who are happy to go along with the idea that China is an ally in the global green revolution. The argument, broadly put, is that whatever our differences on other things (trifles such as security, economics and human rights), surely we can agree on saving the planet.

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves seemed to reach that conclusion when she returned from her visit to Beijing last month. Britain and China “recognize the significance and urgency of climate change,” she said, and the two countries need to deepen their “clean energy partnership.”

Her sentiment was echoed by Lord Adair Turner, a former head of the UK Climate Change Committee, a self-described “technocrat” and the head of the Energy Transitions Commission, whose members include Shell, BP, HSBC and two of China’s largest manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels. This month he praised the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictatorship as “a meritocratic, technocratic, elite system. You have to start with the presumption that they seriously believe there is a problem [with climate change].”

The trouble with this argument is that there is precious little evidence that the CCP gives a hoot about the planet. For Beijing, the apparently benign face of climate diplomacy provides a perfect cover for broader influence operations.

China is the world’s biggest polluter, responsible for about a third of the planet’s annual greenhouse emissions. It builds coal-fired power stations at a faster pace than the rest of the world put together and shows no sign of slowing down. Last year, coal plant construction reached its highest level in a decade, according to the thinktank Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor (GEM).They have previously estimated that new plants are being approved at the rate of two per week. GEM calculates that as of last month, China had under construction coal plants equivalent to an annual 820 million tons of planet-warming CO2, out of a global total of 1,044 million tons — that’s four times the rest of the world combined. It has half of the world’s total operating coal power capacity, and its coal mines are digging up the black stuff at a record pace. China is prioritizing energy security above all else and it is laughable to think that President Xi Jinping intends or expects it to meet its climate commitment of peak emissions by 2030.

Despite this coal frenzy, those who are more sympathetic to China point to its rapid adoption of renewable energy. Yes, coal still accounts for around 60 percent of the country’s electricity, but China leads the world in the installation of solar and wind power. Chinese companies make more than three-quarters of the world’s solar panels and more than half of the world’s wind turbines. Sixty percent of EVs are Chinese and so are 80 percent of the world’s EV batteries. How can western countries hope to transition to clean energy without China’s affordable green technology? 

But Beijing’s cheerleaders are confusing green policy with industrial policy and apparent altruism with imperial ambition. The CCP isn’t pumping vast subsidies into renewable tech because of a shared concern in the health of our planet. They’re doing it because by cornering the global market in technologies of the future, they can further their goal of geopolitical dominance.

For countries like Britain that are short of cash but are still clinging to net-zero pledges, cheap Chinese green tech is tempting. But it needs to be resisted. The true cost is economic coercion and the threat to western security.

It should therefore not come as much of a surprise that, applauded by useful idiots, the CCP funds, supports and works with many western organizations that push for stronger climate action. 

Chatham House, Britain’s self-styled leading foreign affairs thinktank, is urging the government to strike a climate change cooperation agreement with China, and thereby “maintain a constructive relationship even where the wider security and geopolitical context is increasingly fractious.” The proposal was made in a research paper last month, which was based on a “dialogue” with Chinese government experts and financial support from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).

The CIFF was established in 2002 by Sir Chris Hohn as the philanthropic arm of Hohn’s hedge fund. Its remit is far broader than the name suggests. More than a third of its $578 million of grants in 2023 went on climate change. It has an office in Beijing, where it supports projects including the “green development” of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is often described as an international infrastructure project, though is better understood as a tool for building Beijing’s neocolonial empire. The CIFF has employed as a “special advisor” Wang Yi, a climate scientist and member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament. Chatham House also thanked Wang for his input to its research report.

The CIFF is run by Kate Hampton, who last year was awarded a “Friendship Award” from the Chinese government (other worthy 2024 winners include the editors of China Daily, the English-language newspaper owned by the CCP’s propaganda department). Hampton is also a council member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), which has been identified by Washington’s Jamestown Foundation as an influence operation under the umbrella of the CCP’s United Front Works Department. The CCICED is stacked with party functionaries, and actively promotes Beijing’s goal of reshaping the world order. It praises “Xi Jinping thought” and advocates for “a shared future for mankind” (one of Xi’s favorite slogans). The Jamestown Foundation likens the CCP’s ‘green co-option’ to the Soviet Union’s exploitation of the peace movement during the Cold War. 

Another organization active in climate diplomacy is the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), whose founder and president Henry Huiyao Wang was invited to speak at the Oxford Union in November. “We are witnessing the dire consequences of climate change,” he warned. “We need to work together.” The CCG describes itself as a non-governmental organization, which simply isn’t plausible in Xi’s China, where all such entities are closely supervised by the CCP. The CCG has been identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute as another United Front organization.

The chairman of the CCG’s international board is Alastair Michie, a Fife-based businessman and another deserving winner of a CCP Friendship Award. Michie is also the “government and business adviser” to the Hampton Group, a consultancy founded by Yang Tengbo, the alleged Chinese spy who became a confidant and business partner of the Duke of York and was banned from Britain on national security grounds. According to documents published by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which confirmed Yang’s expulsion, Michie prepared a proposal for the alleged spy about creating a royal institute to develop closer ties to China.

Occasionally the mask of climate diplomacy slips. In 2021, John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, was told by Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, to forget about climate cooperation until the US “ceased containing and suppressing China in the world.” For a long time, Kerry tried to do precisely what well-meaning activists advocate: forget about any other prickly political disagreements and make climate change a stand-alone issue. To China, however, climate cooperation was and is nothing more than a bargaining chip. As the Global Times, another CCP-controlled newspaper, has put it: “China has already announced its own climate road map and will stick to its own pace.”

China has no intention of being a good global citizen, whatever the massed ranks of western climate change activists might think. It will happily pocket concessions and carry on regardless.

The irony is that China stands to suffer badly from a warming climate. It also tolerates a far higher level of environmental de-gradation than would be the case in a liberal democracy.

The great smog of China more than a decade ago is a good case in point. When it covered Chinese cities, so thick you could taste it, at first the authorities flatly denied it existed. It was dismissed as “fog” or “mist” — or else it was a scurrilous internet rumor, maybe even a foreign conspiracy on account of the air quality monitor on the roof of the US embassy, which tweeted hourly readings. The authorities ignored the increasingly desperate pleas from neighboring countries, and only acted when internet ridicule and the obvious toll on health became too much even for the CCP.

At some point China will have to address its coal addiction more seriously, but it will do so in its own time, in its own way, and in accordance with the CCP’s other interests. For now, it will use western climate anxiety and the ranks of gullible or greedy activists for its own purposes.

A test of Britain’s willfully blind pursuit of climate “engagement” will come later this year, when Ed Miliband follows in Reeves’s footsteps to Beijing. Unlike Reeves, whose achievements were negligible, the energy secretary could do real damage if he strikes reckless climate deals and welcomes Chinese renewable tech with open arms. In the unlikely event that the new tech will enable him to hit his targets, that will only be achieved by handing control of the UK’s decarbonized grid to the CCP. The consequences for Britain’s national security are chilling.