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China’s dominance in green tech, from solar panels to electric vehicles, is not just an economic story; it’s a geopolitical one. As Beijing gains ground in renewables, critics warn that the country is also exporting a new kind of dependency.
China’s green investments have been hailed for creating jobs and spurring innovation. But some projects have also drawn criticism for displacing communities and degrading ecosystems.
Altun argues that these investments serve a dual purpose: they help green the economy while also expanding China’s influence in developing countries. Her research outlines two dominant perspectives, one sees the spread of Chinese green tech as a tool for economic dominance and dependency; the other frames it as an opportunity for South-South cooperation and accelerated climate action.
Altun said: “There are two main bodies of literature that examine not only China’s green energy investments in Africa and Asia but more generally the Belt and Road investments in the Global South since 2013. The first emphasizes the contributions of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to the economic development and infrastructure construction of Global South countries and supports the process that China defines as deepening South-South cooperation.
The second body of literature consists of studies that take a critical stance towards the BRI. Some of these focus specifically on the harmful environmental impacts of BRI investments carried out until the 2020s and their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. China has been criticized for prioritizing fossil fuel investments and the construction of numerous coal-fired power plants abroad within the scope of BRI. Another strand of the critical literature argues that BRI has created new dependencies between China and some developing countries, and even claims that BRI constitutes a new debt trap for these countries,” she said.
Emphasizing that the energy transition for China is not limited to a mere discursive transformation, Altun said: “Renewable energy is a strong component of China’s development strategy and a crucial part of its goal to achieve leadership in new technologies. At the same time, renewable energy is one of the primary sectors through which Chinese capital is becoming internationalized. Along with all this, China considers green development and the Green BRI as a matter of energy security. There are two topics where we can clearly observe this: coal and nuclear energy debates.”
Speaking on China’s coal investments, Altun said: “In 2021, China announced that it would halt new coal investments abroad, but new coal investments within the country have continued. One of the main reasons for this contradiction is that coal is also considered a matter of energy security in China. China’s energy transition is still not an exit from coal, and it is not expected to be so in the near future. Although halting coal investments abroad is a significant decision, it is not considered sufficient to prevent climate change. While China’s total domestic coal consumption showed a decline during the COVID-19 period, we observe that it began to rise again from 2020 onwards. At the same time, there have been significant increases in solar and wind energy consumption and installed capacity. Based on this, projections suggest that around 2040, electricity consumption will surpass coal consumption. Another leg of China’s coal exit, albeit highly controversial, is the expansion of its nuclear energy capacity. China considers nuclear energy as clean energy, and increasing nuclear capacity is viewed as a policy that serves energy security.”
“We can say that Türkiye’s energy transition is dependent on the EU’s normative and commercial agenda regarding decarbonization. However, this relationship becomes fragile around topics that will create new costs for Turkish exports, such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. For Chinese companies, Türkiye still represents an untapped renewable energy market. However, this market is shaped by various political and administrative challenges. For this reason, instead of investing in large-scale renewable energy projects in Türkiye, Chinese companies tend to focus on selling products to Türkiye. We can observe a similar trend in how China is entering Egypt’s renewable energy sector as well,” she concluded.
