China
doesn’t want to lead alone on climate policies, senior adviser warns
Exclusive:
A top official in Beijing’s Cop delegation says China is committed to clean
energy – but US’s absence is a problem
Jonathan
Watts and Fiona Harvey in Belém
Wed 19
Nov 2025 11.00 GMT
China is
committed to the energy transition needed to avert climate breakdown – but does
not want to take the lead alone in the absence of the US, one of the country’s
senior advisers has told the Guardian.
Wang Yi
said China would provide more money to vulnerable countries, but the EU’s
climate commissioner has warned Beijing is not doing enough to cut emissions.
“I don’t
think China would like to play a leadership role alone,” said Wang, the
vice-chair of China’s expert panel on climate change. “The most important thing
is how to maintain momentum. Now we have two possible directions: one, we go
forward with clearer, more ambitious targets. The other may be going back.
“So
that’s why China would like to do our best to steer in this kind of direction
towards low-carbon or green transition, but in cooperation with other
countries. We don’t want to take the lead alone. We need comprehensive
leadership.”
In an
exclusive interview, Wang said theChinese president, Xi Jinping, was committed
to the energy transition for the long haul despite resistance from some
industrial sectors. He explained that China’s priority in Belém was to help the
Brazilian presidency achieve a successful climate conference, and to show the
benefits of multilateral decision-making. On Tuesday, the first draft of a
possible agreement was published at the Cop30 summit, reviving the hotly
contested plan to transition away from fossil fuels.
China is
the planet’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide from burning of coal, oil and
gas, but it is now also a world leader in the production, installation and
export of wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars.
He said
China wanted to “speed up and scale up its efforts to provide more global
public goods” despite serious geopolitical and economic tensions and unilateral
barriers to trade, including tariffs. The country’s emissions have been flat or
falling for 18 months.
He
estimated China’s per capita power consumption would continue to grow from
7,000 kilowatt hours in 2024 to “well over 10,000, maybe 12,000” – but there
would be a steady move away from fossil fuels to wind and solar, as well as
green hydrogen, green ammonia and electric vehicles. Along with a new power
grid system, he said the country was in the midst of a “comprehensive green
transition of social economic development”.
As in
many countries, Wang suggested there was some resistance to change, but the
president had sent a clear signal about the direction of travel. “Even in
China, we have a lot of industrial conflict ... but the central government,
including President Xi, is very clear to us that we must, in the next five
years’ time, speed up the new power system.”
In the
absence of the US, China’s role is even more crucial than usual to the success
or failure of Cop30, where the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
has urged his negotiators to lay the foundations for an exit ramp out of the
fossil fuel era.
Wang, who
is an ecological economist and standing member of China’s state congress, said
a roadmap would be challenging – particularly if it tried to impose a single
set of criteria. “I think it’s very difficult. We cannot have a unified pathway
for a phasedown or phaseout,” he said. “Different countries, based on different
conditions, have different strategies and different transition pathways.”
He added
that Trump’s second term would have a bigger impact than his first because the
US had adopted more aggressive anti-climate policies. He also noted that the
European Union was distracted by the war in Ukraine and economic problems.
After
Trump’s imposition of hefty tariffs, Wang said progress on spreading green
technology was being slowed by trade barriers, which particularly affected
developing nations. He was also concerned about the high price of carbon in
Europe: “I think some countries have double standards. On the one hand, they
want China to speed up, to reduce our emissions, to take the lead, but on the
other hand, they worry about China’s competitive capacity and also very
important, maybe security … because there are very high ratios of China’s
products.”
Despite
the considerable gap between nations’ plans to cut emissions and what is needed
to hold temperatures to 1.5C, he said China did not want to discuss targets at
this Cop summit.
On the
crucial issue of climate finance, Wang urged Europe and other early industrial
nations to step up to the goal of providing $1.3tn (£988bn) for poorer nations
to move their economies away from fossil fuels – and adapt to the growing
threat of droughts, floods, extreme heat and more violent storms.
Wealthier
countries have argued that China is now rich enough to make a contribution.
Wopke Hoekstra, climate commissioner for the EU, said China needed to take more
responsibility for cutting carbon, adding: “China is by far the world’s largest
emitter; according to the UN it is an upper middle income country. It is
responsible for more than 30% of global emissions.
“So at
the moment China is not doing what science expects it to do – that has effects
way beyond China itself. That is why we would hope to see more Chinese ambition
going forward.”
He said
the EU had made a strong diplomatic push to forge common interests with China
on climate issues at a series of meetings this year. But the trading bloc has
angered Beijing with a tariff that penalises imports of high-carbon goods such
as steel coming from countries with inadequate policies in place to cut
emissions. The lack of a strong public alliance between the EU and China leaves
a gap in global climate diplomacy.
Wang said
China was planning to increase its financial contributions to the global south,
and that the government’s draft five-year plan mentioned the provision of “more
global public goods”.
The
Brazilian presidency of Cop30 has begun the process of releasing iterations of
draft decision texts on all of the topics under discussion. The most closely
watched is the “mutirao decision” which takes in contentious issues on which
there is so far little agreement: finance, transparency, trade and the fact
that countries’ emissions-cutting plans fall drastically short of the stringent
cuts needed to limit global heating to 1.5C, a goal of the Paris agreement.
On
Tuesday, a group of more than 80 countries called for the conference to address
the “transition away from fossil fuels” that was agreed at Cop28 in Dubai, but
which has not been followed up since. Brazil included options for starting the
process of drawing up a roadmap for such a phaseout in the draft text, but
these are likely to come under fierce attack from Saudi Arabia and its allies,
including Russia, Bolivia and others.
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