US President Donald Trump’s negative portrayal of China’s achievements in renewable energy began at a White House meeting with oil executives on January 9 and was amplified at the World Economic Forum later that month.
The story he told was shaped more by domestic politics than fact – a narrative that has lingered through subsequent debates over China’s alleged clean-energy “overcapacity”.
While such rhetoric might rally support in the American Midwest, it does not withstand scrutiny. Trump’s jibes served a familiar political purpose: to undermine European net-zero strategies, defend fossil fuels at home and frame China’s green industries as a strategic threat rather than a shared solution. What he is really attacking is the country at the centre of the global clean-energy supply chain.
When Trump paints China’s wind sector as a backward, export-only operation – claiming Chinese companies make most of the world’s turbines, sell them to “stupid” European buyers and barely use them at home – he is mocking the very hardware helping his allies meet their climate targets.
For much of the past two decades, Beijing has treated cleaner air and power as instruments of economic progress. Long before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2060 carbon neutrality pledge, China was integrating energy security, pollution control and industrial upgrading into a single planning logic that now underpins the energy transition.
The mainland’s grid-connected wind and solar capacity exceeded 1.84 billion kilowatts last year, overtaking coal for the first time and accounting for roughly 47 per cent of total installed power capacity. Renewable energy accounted for more than 60 per cent of electricity generation capacity. In the first quarter, wind and solar power accounted for 22.5 per cent of electricity consumption.
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