[Wen/Observer Network Liu Bai]"From Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa to Kiribati and Tonga in the Pacific, China's dominant position as the world's first important power kingdom is growing day by day, and its influence is beginning to emerge."
The Financial Times on October 10 that Chinese enterprises have dominated several clean energy technology industries such as solar panels, electric vehicles and wind turbines, and that China's clean energy technology offers huge opportunities for the energy transformation of developing countries.
Some scholars bluntly said that China has a very firm attitude towards this transformation and will hardly look back once it identifies the direction. Some experts bluntly said that the U.S. government has not yet realized how popular China's technology is. As Chinese companies continue to occupy markets where U.S. companies have withdrawn, the clean energy sector may eventually face disputes over 5G and Huawei, but by then the United States will lose European support and there will be few alternatives available.
Data from the French Foreign Trade Bank and the British Climate and Energy Chief Ember (Ember) show that China's solar panel exports reached 236 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, more than three times in 2019, and this year is expected to reach a new record high.
However, these figures highlight only one of the many clean energy technology industries that China currently dominates.
A similar surge in China's clean energy technology exports is also reflected in areas such as electric vehicles, electric trucks, batteries, wind turbines, gas turbines, small nuclear reactors, as well as transformers and other critical transmission equipment required by modern power grids.
Tim Buckley, director of the Australian agency Climate Energy Finance, which focuses on China-related issues, said China’s long-term ambitions in the field of clean energy are “far-reaching,” making a sharp contrast to China’s superpower competitor, the United States: U.S. President Donald Trump supports the fossil-fuel industry and canceled the previous government’s support for renewable energy.
"I think China is seizing this opportunity in a way with great geopolitical wisdom, taking full advantage of the United States 'foolish retreat into a petroleum country," he added."China is the winner. The United States has voluntarily abandoned the competitive arena."
According to the article, from a certain point of view, China's development process towards electrification and then dominating the clean energy technology industry is impressive enough.
In a report released by Ember in September, a series of data highlighted the booming development of clean energy and electrification in China.
Among them are China’s clean energy investment of $6250 billion in 2023, accounting for one-third of global total investment; the same year, clean energy contributed $1.9 trillion to the Chinese economy, accounting for about one-tenth of China’s GDP, which is equivalent to the total size of the entire Australian economy.
The speed of electrification in China is also worthy of attention. In 2023, China's electrification rate has reached 32%, and is growing at a rate of about 1 percentage point per year; while electrification rates in Europe and the United States have stagnated over the past decade.
Summarizing these achievements, analysts call China the world's first important "electricity kingdom", a global manufacturing superpower, whose industry relies on electricity rather than fossil fuels, and the economy is increasingly driven by clean energy technology.
China's energy transition has been recognized by environmental organizations. Christoph Nedopil Wang, a Chinese energy and finance expert at Griffith University in Australia, further emphasized that there are deep-seated strategic considerations behind China's decarbonization efforts.
"First of all, this can consolidate China's position as a global manufacturing center in the era of clean energy; Secondly, it can solve a core shortcoming, that is, its dependence on imported fossil fuels," he said. "China's attitude towards this transformation is very firm. Once the direction is determined and put into action, there will hardly be any turning back."
For many developing countries, China’s sufficient clean energy technology not only offers an opportunity to get rid of its dependence on fossil fuels, but also creates conditions for it to rely on low-cost electricity to develop new manufacturing industries.
However, China still faces many complicated problems on the road to the "power kingdom". One of the core challenges is to reduce the use of coal in power generation and heat production in heavy industries such as steel and cement.
David Fishman, an energy analyst in Shanghai at the energy consulting firm The Lantau Group, said China policymakers and engineers were devoting "a lot of energy" to overcoming the challenge of electrification in heavy industries.
“They are defeating every electrifiable, difficult link in the heavy industry,” he said, “sometimes it’s just a simple process change, just investing in equipment transformation; but sometimes the technology involved is very cutting-edge and requires pilot verification, and it’s very difficult.”
With its dominance in clean energy technology, China can shape itself as a reliable long-term partner, providing developing countries with an alternative to the United States.
Ilaria Mazzocco, an industry policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the U.S. think tank, noted that this will have far-reaching geopolitical implications as Chinese clean energy technology companies become increasingly rooted in the U.S. withdrawal markets.
“This pattern could eventually evolve into a similar dispute around 5G with Huawei, but when the United States loses European support, there will be fewer alternatives to offer,” Mazoko said, “in fact, I think the U.S. government is not really aware of how popular these new energy and electricity technologies are exported from China.”
About the Trump administration’s “reverse” move to cut clean energy spending, New York Times famous columnist Thomas Friedman, author of “The World is flat”, wrote a lamentation, “Do you hear, it’s a huge cloud roar from the East, that 1.4 billion Chinese people are joking at us.”
He bombarded the "Big and Beautiful Act" of the clean energy industry. "Chinese people can't believe their good luck: at the beginning of the era of artificial intelligence with huge power consumption, the President of the United States and his party actually made one of the most serious strategic self-harm behaviors imaginable." "Trump handed over the future of American electricity to China."
Friedman and even the sighs of the western media are actually not surprising.
Data from the National Energy Administration shows that in the first five months of this year alone, my country's newly installed photovoltaic capacity reached 196 million kilowatts, a year-on-year increase of 57%. The installed capacity of photovoltaic power generation has historically exceeded 1 billion kilowatts, reaching 1.08 billion kilowatts, equivalent to the total installed capacity of about 48 Three Gorges power stations.
According to the "Global Offshore Wind Market Perspectives" and the "Global Wind Energy Report" released on June 2025, since this year, China's wind power plant has grown rapidly, and wind power generation accounts for more than 12%. by 2030, the global offshore wind power plant capacity is expected to break 230 gigawatts, of which, China's deep-sea projects will become the core growth point of international cooperation.
The British "Guardian" has also noted that especially since the beginning of this year, China's renewable energy expansion momentum has not diminished. In the first five months, it has added 198 GW of solar energy and 46 GW of wind power installed capacity, enough to generate electricity equivalent to that of Indonesia or Turkey. The new capacity in May is equivalent to the power generation of Poland.
“We’ve long known that China is accelerating the installation of wind and solar power, but we’re shocked by the pace,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, senior researcher at the Asian Association Policy Research Institute.