Is China a climate goodie or baddie

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.

You could tell me that China still gets most of its electricity from coal and is building more new coal power plants than anywhere else in the world. And you’d be right.

You could also tell me that China (with a sixth of the world’s population) is installing about half of the world’s new renewable energy. And you’d be right too.

In fact, you could read academic experts making all of the above points on The Conversation. It’s OK to feel confused: China really is a key driver of both emissions and solutions.

The world’s largest emitter is also the single most important country in determining how much the climate will breakdown and whether the world will do enough to stop it.

So what should we make of China and its role in global climate policy?

Xi on stage — China’s president Xi Jinping speaks at Cop21 in 2015, the UN climate summit that lead to the Paris agreement. Frederic Legrand - COMEO / shutterstock

Imagine a negotiating hall in Belem, Brazil, six weeks from now: it’s the Cop30 climate summit. Officials are murmuring to each other, translators are whispering into their headsets, and people are crowding around one delegation in particular. It isn’t the US or the EU drawing the crowd: it’s China.

Until relatively recently, this would have seemed an outlandish suggestion. But over the past few years many academics from around the world have made the same point: China is increasingly becoming a world leader in climate diplomacy.

For decades, many assumed such leadership would come from the US or Europe. But as US commitment has wavered, and Europe seems preoccupied by other matters, expectations are shifting eastward.

Yixian Sun, an associate professor of international development at the University of Bath, says it’s time for China to step up. He says that: “As an emerging superpower with advantages in clean technologies and a leadership that recently reaffirmed their commitment to climate action, the country is well positioned.”

Shannon Gibson, who researches the dynamics of UN climate negotiations at the University of Southern California, says that China already is stepping up. In her analysis, the country “seems to be happily filling the climate power vacuum created by the US exit [from the Paris agreement]”.

Beijing, she writes, is using leadership on climate change as part of a “broader strategy of gaining influence and economic power by supporting economic growth and cooperation in developing countries”.

Whether China is engaging in climate diplomacy reluctantly, enthusiastically or strategically, something is clearly shifting. There was a nice illustration of this at the last UN climate summit, Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year.

At the time, Lucia Green-Weiskel of Trinity College in the US reported on a spat over whether China should provide funds to help poorer countries adapt to climate change at a level comparable to other big emitters. The dispute, she noted, “almost shut down the entire conference”.

Previously, only UN-listed “developed countries” were expected to pay. However, the draft agreement called on “all actors” to scale up financing. This would have included China, which is a major emitter today but only industrialised recently (so has little historical responsibility for climate change) and remains poorer per capita than other big emitters.

In the end, a compromise was reached. Green-Weiskel says the final agreement “excluded China from the heavier expectations placed on richer nations”.

Why China’s promises matter

China recently pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 7%–10% by 2035, as part of its commitments under the Paris agreement.

Most analysts were underwhelmed, arguing that Beijing should be more ambitious. But Myles Allen and Kai Jiang of the University of Oxford say it’s worth taking pledges like this seriously as “Beijing has form in only promising what it plans to deliver”. They note that, for instance, China looks set to deliver on a promise to peak its emissions this decade “barely 50 years after it began to industrialise in earnest”.

For them: “China’s targets aren’t just slogans or aspirations – they are statements of intent, grounded in what the country believes it can deliver. And where China goes, others will follow.” That’s because even fairly modest revisions to China’s targets can shift expectations and put pressure on other big emitters to do more.

We can’t simply assert that China is a goodie or a baddie when it comes to global climate change policy. This is complex stuff with lots of moving parts, and you can easily change perceptions simply by emphasising coal power over new solar, or vice versa.

Some will say any leadership is better than a vacuum. And China does seem more serious about addressing climate change than many western governments. But others might feel uneasy: are we ready for a global climate order in which it’s Beijing calling the shots, not Washington or Brussels?

Post-carbon

Welcome back to post-carbon after a couple weeks off. It can be hard to explain to the layperson how a decision made at Cop30 will actually affect them. So this week, we want to know if you’ve directly noticed any big global climate policy affecting your day to day life, for better or for worse. Please share any examples that spring to mind.