U.S.–based climate activists have seen a challenging first two months of 2026. In January, the United States withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In February, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized its repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which served as the legal basis for federal greenhouse gas regulations. While the U.S. federal government has leaned into climate inaction and distanced itself from international cooperation, China has continued its expansion of global power by means of green development and strategic partnerships, notably striking a deal with Canada on electric vehicles.
What does Chinese environmentalism mean for the United States? What does Chinese environmentalism mean for the global order? The Carter Center spoke with Alex Wang to contextualize China’s rise through the lens of its green leadership, assess the role of China’s environmental reputation and perceptions in underlying geopolitical power dynamics, and discuss what the future may be for a world with limited resources and a rapidly changing climate.
Alex Wang is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and a Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Prior to this position, he served as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) based in Beijing and the founding director of NRDC’s China Environmental Law & Governance Project. He is a member of the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a board member of the Environmental Law Institute. His most recent publication, Chinese Global Environmentalism, investigates the history and motivations behind Chinese environmentalism, as well as its domestic and international impacts.
Isobel Li: You recently published a book titled Chinese Global Environmentalism, which examines the motivations, strategies, and implications for China’s embrace of green development. Could you briefly introduce this book? What were some of your most important findings?
Alex Wang: The book gets at the question of why China is promoting green development on the global stage, and it does a few things, starting with a discussion of the way we conceptualize China in the environmental space. China is viewed fairly negatively in the developed world and viewed with more mixed reactions in the Global South and among the middle powers, and I try to work through the way China’s environmental actions help and hinder their reputation globally.
When I started working on environmental issues in China twenty-five years ago, China was arguably in an environmental crisis. Pollution was extraordinarily bad, and scholarly analysis often connected that with political systems, arguing China’s non-democratic, top-down system was unable to respond to public demand for the environment. But in the last fifteen years, as China has increasingly prioritized the environment by dealing with domestic air, water, and soil pollution, a different line of critique arose abroad about China’s authoritarian methods.
The corollary of that has been the extension of authoritarianism onto the global stage with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and discourses have shifted to focus on the economic and security threats for the developed world created by Chinese green development. The argument is that China’s success in selling renewable energy and electric vehicles is building Chinese economic strength that will in turn translate into military strength and transform geopolitical relationships with the rest of the world, ultimately playing to the disadvantage of the United States and the Western world writ large.
However, as I’ve worked over the last few decades, I’ve also seen more positive discourses arise, three of which I highlight in the book. The first is a developmental narrative about how China’s environmental problems were caused by poverty: as China became wealthier, it began to resolve some of these problems, such as in the air pollution context. The second narrative I call “good” environmental authoritarianism. One way to think about it is what foreigners commonly say about China being able to get things done, often in reference to infrastructure and popularized by Dan Wang’s book about China as a country of engineers. The third narrative is one in which countries pragmatically engage with the opportunities that China brings. I use the Chilean case study as representative of middle powers and Global South countries that aren’t necessarily aligned with China in terms of culture or values but also see the relationship as too valuable to ignore. Countries don’t want to forego the opportunities in trading or investment— or simply engaging— with China, and all of this is occurring in the context of what the United States and Europe are doing as the other leading global powers. When the United States calls renewable energy a scam and pulls out of the Paris Agreement under the Trump administration, China doesn’t need to behave particularly well to look better by comparison. Likewise, if the United States improved its environmental situation, China would need to rise to the occasion in order to gain in reputation.
Another point of the book is to create a more nuanced picture of what is going on in China. Like many people, I agree that China is leading in providing cheap, reliable, clean technologies, and China deserves credit for that. On the other hand, because the U.S. has become so anti-renewable energy, rose-colored perceptions of China’s environmentalism can overlook other areas of concern. In the book, I describe the controversy surrounding China’s hydropower dams in Southeast Asia on the Mekong River Delta. China’s official line is that the dams are positive for development and good for the climate. But there’s a very clear environmental cost, in that the dams are degrading the natural cycle refreshing the Mekong River Delta, which feeds agriculture and sustains an entire way of life. There’s a real trade-off happening that the official line in China is not willing to admit, and the way that they’ve engaged with criticisms— admitting no fault and attacking their critics— is worrying.
China controls the upstream, and downstream countries have much smaller economies that rely on trade with China. What will China do in that position of power when there’s a genuine concern about social and environmental problems? Will they compromise in some way, or will they brook no dissent and plow through? This book is an effort to understand China’s environmental motivations and examine how green development really manifests on the ground, and unsurprisingly, it is complicated.
IL: It was striking to see how China’s motivations for environmental action are often not exclusively about having clean air and water. How has China’s consideration of global power dynamics shaped its green development strategy?
AW: When China took part in the 1972 Stockholm Conference, which is known as the birthplace of international environmental law, its engagement was highly ideological and cast the developed world as the source of all environmental ills. Move forward to the Reform Period, China was trying to recover from the Cultural Revolution, trying to build the capacity to participate internationally, and often was in a very defensive crouch trying to ward off potential threats— in the environmental context, trying to deal with potential blame for pollution that would create limits on China’s economic development.
In the 80s and the 90s, China was starting to become the largest emitter of many different substances. The book has a case study of the Montreal Protocol: because many developed countries were exiting the business of manufacturing goods that produce ozone-depleting substances, China quickly became the largest producer of those items and had to grapple with the question of mitigation. In the Montreal Protocol’s initial period, China did a relatively good job with compliance. This environmental behavior was pragmatic: they needed to comply in order to sell products to the rest of the world. However, in the last decade or so, there have been some problems with enforcement and compliance. China’s approach to handling it has not always given the global community the greatest confidence, simultaneously denying the problem and working in the background to solve it. According to third party monitors, China seems to have resolved the problem. But the practice of hiding problems is not good for China’s global reputation. It reinforces the idea that China will hide information or not disclose things.
Around twenty-five years ago, in the later period, China took an interesting turn towards eventual leadership in non-fossil technologies and electric vehicles. I was based in Beijing at the time, and upon reflection, I can see it as a very complicated political environment. On the ground, people were seeing undeniably bad pollution. Meanwhile, civil society groups had space to raise issues during the Hu–Wen period and were getting international attention because the problem needed to be fixed. This was an economic development story, where authorities decided for a variety of reasons that something needed to change. They knew that Chinese people were buying millions and millions of cars and if they were all oil-powered cars, China’s reliance on Middle East oil would create the same problems experienced by the United States. At the same time, electric vehicles were a dead technology in the rest of the world, getting killed by the vested interest in the United States and elsewhere, going nowhere. China saw that, beyond Tesla, there were no global incumbents that could dominate the electric vehicle industry. Electric vehicles were driven by economic policy. The environmental agency was really nowhere to be seen in this story.
We see this combination of economic, energy security, and pollution reduction motives, paired with an international reputation problem where China is getting criticized daily for having the most polluted cities. Additionally, there was a very lofty goal— which I wasn’t aware of at the time— of China not wanting to miss the next Industrial Revolution. There were elite public intellectuals writing about this, and you could imagine their work having some traction among leaders wanting to be bold in that way.
IL: How has competition with China positively influenced other countries’ domestic environmentalism?
AW: The Inflation Reduction Act passed during the Biden administration is the largest climate legislation the United States has ever passed, and it was beginning to work until Republican policymakers dismantled it this past year. Europe has also leaned into green industrial policy.
There was a strong bipartisan consensus that it wasn’t good for the United States to rely excessively on Chinese supply chains. With COVID, you saw how that reliance created vulnerabilities for all sorts of products. Similarly, the idea that you would have core energy and transportation technologies completely dominated by a chief rival didn’t seem good. Maybe creating alternative supply chains— even though the cost of getting those technologies would be higher— was worth paying for. That’s where we were headed under the Biden administration. There was support for the idea that the United States might do a reverse China strategy, where American companies partner with Chinese companies and license Chinese technologies to learn from Chinese companies on electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energies. It was starting to happen and now it’s been stymied by the current administration, and in the long term, we’ll see this as a really bad strategy.
Europe is continuing to do it, but they’re trying to balance wanting to buy cheap Chinese technologies with building their own national companies that can compete effectively. Those two goals are in tension, and European clean technology companies are continuing to lose market share to Chinese competitors. Europe still needs to work this out.
IL: You discussed how China can improve its reputation through environmental leadership, but at the same time, this leadership often induces security fears in liberal democracies like the United States. What are the implications of this competition on the global order?
AW: A plausible and desirable end state would be one in which you had multiple superpowers that counterbalanced each other, checked each other’s excesses, and provided alternatives. The challenge now is that China is the upstart, thought of as a threat by the current superpowers, and the desire is to shut down China’s ability to rise. However, I think many people are starting to see that this rise seems inevitable. What the United States should do is try to outcompete China rather than stop China, because trying to stop China has not worked very well. Why don’t we invest in ourselves so that we can compete and create a plausible rival power center? The United States is still the most powerful country in the world for many reasons, but it’s losing ground in important areas.
One of the ideas in the book is that China is making inroads through green development because it’s providing public goods and services that other countries want. For instance, a service might be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping address climate change. That’s a way to build global standing: doing things that other people want rather than using coercion and fear. The United States story has always been about trying to create a global system that works for other people. Right now, the United States is moving into a coercive period, very hegemonic and using its power to force concessions from others. I think that can give a country some gains, but eventually if people dislike it, they find alternatives or create friction that costs the dominant player a lot. As much as the liberal order seems to be falling apart, the idea that treating other countries with respect and reciprocity is still what countries want in finding some sort of new equilibrium.
I think eventually we’ll have a new equilibrium where China has an elevated place but it’s not the dominant power. The United States will still be there; Europe will still be there. Other countries may rise to be more powerful. Maybe there will be a middle powers coalition, as Mark Carney in Canada proposed. We may see some different alignments.
IL: In the book, you discussed how China relies on liberal order norms such as the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) established by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which recognizes that developed nations have a greater responsibility for action. Could you speak a little more on how China will have to balance its goals with maintaining its claim to the “developing nation” status?
AW: With international law, there’s always been the dynamic of if you are powerful, you use the norms that benefit you and you don’t adhere to the norms that you see as not serving your interests. The United States has certainly been guilty of this, and China has also behaved in this way. As it has grown more influential, China is using norms like sovereignty or CBDR to its advantage. China’s not here adhering to the South China Sea decision when it disagrees, and it’s been trying to reshape human rights norms in the UN Human Rights Council.
In the environmental context, what I think has been interesting is that China played a very defensive game from the beginning in the 90s using CBDR and climate justice to argue about who was responsible for climate action. Many of those arguments are persuasive to the rest of the world because it’s true that the United States is the largest historical emitter and is much higher on per capita emissions. That’s about fairness, about what share of a limited resource you get. At the same time, China is now by far the largest emitter and it is exacerbating climate problems. Moreover, China isn’t that poor anymore. It has the ability to address the problem. It can’t continue to claim it’s the same as other Global South countries.
What you’ve seen in the last fifteen years with China is that it’s continued to play a defensive game, but it has seen the writing on the wall. In some ways, the norms signaled to China’s decision-makers where the world was headed. They saw it was a carbon-limited world and believed they would need to find a different way to create energy without harming the climate. They also saw massive economic opportunities, and twenty years ago they began to implement a strategy on this in fits and starts. One of the other points I make in the book is that as much as the senior leadership wants to make themselves seem like an all-knowing decision-maker, the process was very iterative. It was contentious and people fought and there were ups-and-downs. China’s method of maintaining top-down controls while preserving enough freedom for cities and companies to compete in market-based ways did lead to a tremendous success, but again, it’s not a perfect picture. These solar and EV companies are now engaged in so-called involution. There’s such a vicious price competition that it’s not clear whether they can survive for the long term, but right now, it’s undeniable that they created a system that ended up making China dominant.
IL: I’m thinking about the Global South aspect of environmental competition, beyond how the United States responds to China directly with domestic policy. In one of your previous webinars on climate competition versus collaboration, you made an analogy of the United States and China being like suitors pursuing countries to win over their favor. The book highlighted Chile as an example of this. Could you share more about how international engagements with developing countries have changed?
AW: The book grapples with the green elements of the Belt and Road and China’s outbound investment and trade, and how the broader dynamic of environmental concern manifests in three different ways. First, when China goes out to acquire resources it is creating demand that puts an extraordinary pressure on the environment. In the case of minerals, mining is a dirty business; it creates many environmental challenges. Second, Chinese consumers are consuming increasing quantities of commodities like soy and beef, which has exacerbated deforestation and put other pressures on the environment. Third, China has also been investing a lot in infrastructure abroad, building freeways that cut through natural areas or building ports and airports that require destruction of natural environments. For example, I discuss the Kenya Standard Gauge Railway as a case study in the book. Those concerns have led to a lot of criticism about China being a detriment to the global environment, and China has responded in certain ways to those critiques.
For a long time, China heavily financed coal-fired power plants abroad, and it was one of the last countries to say it was not going to fund the construction of these power plants going forward. A lot of the research shows that there are very practical reasons for China’s decision: it had become very risky to finance these power plants and there were negative public reactions to these investments. So China got out of that business, although China has not stopped investing in fossil fuel projects as a whole.
The developed world has been very hawkish in trying to warn Global South countries about the risks of engaging with China. The case studies that I talk about in the book, including the Chilean case study, really emphasize the fact that much of the rest of the world doesn’t see China in that way. In fact, recent polling sees the United States under the Trump administration as more of a threat than China. Many countries are seeing China as an opportunity. Scholars have written about the hedging or non-alignment strategies of countries, and that just reflects a basic logic that if you are a country with limited power, it would be natural for you to want to diversify your relationships and to try to gain the greatest benefit you can from each of your partners.
Many countries seek infrastructure funding or buy affordable products, including clean technologies, from China. They might seek different types of investments from the United States or Europe, but they don’t necessarily want to choose, and you see that in Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, and other places around the globe.
Sometimes, the US government has been limited to raising risks about threats or blocking Chinese deals because the US government doesn’t have influence over American companies in the same way that the Chinese government might have over state-owned enterprises, so that some of the Chinese companies will operate more on a hybrid political and economic logic. Because the US government has limited controls, they resort to rhetorical or coercive measures that are not always so successful in Global South countries. A student of mine wrote a paper about US–China competition in South Africa this past semester. His point, which I agree with, was that China has incrementally been investing and working with South Africans on various projects that help South Africa move towards decarbonization through solar or wind projects, whereas the United States had put together a program called a Just Energy Transition Partnership that didn’t have a lot of funding but had a lot of lofty rhetorical language behind it, and didn’t necessarily generate much actual development on the ground. In that sense you might say China is more successful in that competition. Around the world, US companies do invest in a lot of other areas that are very successful, but in the clean technology space, China is rushing ahead.
IL: Seeing the United States cut funds that would have made green development manifest physically rather than rhetorically, do you have any insights on what is necessary to overcome this roadblock to action?
AW: For the United States, thinking about competing economically by providing things that people value is important: rather than be obstructionist or coercive, strike deals that the United States can benefit from as well. That could be done in areas that are supported by the Trump administration, such as critical minerals, which are part of clean technology supply chains. Even though I disagree with many things that the Trump administration is doing, it’s plausible that they could act on certain technologies, like geothermal or nuclear or critical minerals mining, that would push the ball forward.
I think the current administration’s antipathy towards renewable energy and electric vehicles is inexplicable, and the United States needs to compete in this area. It’s important for Americans to come to some agreement on how to make the country stronger going forward. Compromise seems virtually impossible given how polarized we are, but we need to try to find some way that we can generate more value in this country rather than fighting with each other.