How China exploits the West’s climate anxiety

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 organisations 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.

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Rachel Reeves seemed to reach that conclusion when she returned from her visit to Beijing last month. Britain and China ‘recognise 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.