Analysis by André Benoit, re-published here in The Multiplural World, Nov 25, 2025 (with four supplementary readings listed at the end of the text)
As Washington debates fossil fuels, Beijing builds the clean-energy systems of the next century… for itself and for the entire world
Introduction by The Multiplural World: This informative analysis was first published in RT News on Nov 21, 2025. It is supplemented here by The Multiplural World with four related readings listed at the end of the text. The analysis is limited to examination of alternative energies. It does not address the global consequences of the continued rise of fossil fuel extraction and burning in the world. Nor does it account for the deepening political dominance of governing, fossil-fuel death cults in the Western, imperialist countries and in Japan and South Korea. The essay does not ask how the death cults will respond to the alternative energy challenges they face from China and from those countries adopting China’s alt-energy technologies.
The death cults have committed themselves to a political and economic course giving pre-eminence to fossil fueled energy. How will they respond to the green energy challengers as led by China? Ultimately, they will seek to bomb them into rubble, as seen in different but similar circumstances in Gaza, Palestine. A global environmental movement must respond to the imperialist war threats with an outlook and program combining degrowth and demilitarization. Such a movement does not exist, and so far it shows no sign of developing. Evidently, it will only come into being amidst the gigantic struggle now upon us all for survival of human civilization in a world of worsening global warming emergency, as caused by the expansionist and heartless global capitalist and imperialist order.
Washington and its imperialist allies are vastly expanding their fossil fuel extraction and burning; this in the name of waging a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. ‘Clean energy’ alone cannot save humanity from the global warming emergency as caused by expansionist capitalism. A degrowth path will harness clean energy as well as all such scientific advances part of a vast drawdown of all the destructive waste and excess of the capitalist order. Such a roadmap has yet to gain a large following, even though the fate of the planet and the humans who live upon it depends on its creation.
(end introduction)
As the United States under Donald Trump dismantles green energy programs and returns to fossil-fuel politics, China has moved into a different league. While Washington argues over subsidies and regulations, Beijing is exporting entire clean-energy systems at industrial scale – and turning Africa into the most visible example of how far the balance of power has shifted.
Chinese solar plants, mini-grids and battery hubs are lighting up regions that remained energy-poor for decades, powered by hardware the U.S. has shown no interest in supplying because it simply cannot compete with on price or volume. Each new shipment of ultra-cheap solar panels pushes Beijing deeper into markets Washington once hoped to influence. Each one cements China’s role as the dominant force in the technologies that will define the next century.
The rivalry is no longer theoretical. One side is shaping the future of global energy; the other is watching that future slip out of reach. The real question is how much of the emerging energy order will end up built on Chinese terms – and what space, if any, the U.S. will have in it.
China’s industrial machine
China’s rise in the clean-energy sector didn’t happen by accident or market luck. It is the product of a state-driven industrial machine built to supply every link of the solar supply chain – from polysilicon processing and wafer cutting to battery chemistry and grid-scale storage. No other country has anything comparable.
In 2024, China installed about 329 gigawatts of new solar capacity, lifting its total to more than 1,100 gigawatts – the largest of any country and a scale unmatched globally. The annual increase alone exceeded the entire installed solar capacity of many countries. That scale is not just impressive – it rewrites the economics of the industry. Chinese panels now cost as little as $0.07–0.09 per watt, a level Western producers cannot approach even with subsidies.
Behind these numbers is a model built on economies of scale, public subsidies and an industrial policy focused on cost control and supply-chain integration. This combination allows China to push prices down while reinforcing a manufacturing ecosystem that continues to expand faster than the country can absorb internally.
China’s rapid production growth has far exceeded domestic demand, creating the excess capacity that now fuels its global expansion. By turning this surplus into a strategic export industry, Beijing is able to supply ultra-cheap hardware at scales that Western manufacturers cannot match. What appears as “overcapacity” in Western policy language and debates is, for China, a deliberate industrial advantage that opens new markets and strengthens its position in the global energy economy.
Beijing’s leadership makes clear that the energy transition is not an experiment but a strategic direction. Speaking at the United Nations in 2025, President Xi Jinping described the low-carbon shift as a historic course that countries must pursue without hesitation. It was less a diplomatic appeal than a statement of intent: China sees the transition as a strategic arena it intends to shape, while others are still debating whether to commit.
Africa: Ground zero for China’s green expansion
If there is one region that exposes the scale of China’s clean-energy push, it is Africa. The continent has some of the world’s best solar potential and some of its weakest energy systems. For Beijing, this combination is an opportunity to display its anti-hegemonic role in the world.
Around 600 million Africans still lack reliable electricity. Entire national grids operate on aging infrastructure, blackouts can last hours or days, and diesel generators remain the default backup in everything from hospitals to small shops. In many countries, the cost of that diesel power reaches $0.70 per kilowatt-hour – an impossible price for households and a constant drag on local businesses.
Chinese solar projects arrive into this environment with instant impact. Mini-grids tested in Nigeria, for example, supply electricity for roughly $0.16 per kilowatt-hour. The initial capital outlay recoups itself in a matter of months. The difference isn’t marginal; it is transformative. In some rural regions, Chinese installations provide the first steady electricity supply people have seen in their lifetimes.
The scale of adoption is accelerating. From June 2024 to June 2025, African imports of Chinese solar panels jumped by 60% – from 9.4 gigawatts to 15 gigawatts. South Africa alone bought 3.7 gigawatts. Nigeria’s imports quadrupled to 1.7 gigawatts. Algeria’s soared by a factor of 33. These numbers reflect more than demand. They show that China is becoming the default supplier for a continent moving, however unevenly, into the clean-energy era.
Beijing’s approach combines hardware, financing and infrastructure in one package. State agencies, political banks and companies like PowerChina handle the entire chain: surveying sites, building systems, supplying equipment, providing engineers and structuring long-term repayment. African governments don’t have to deal with fragmented contractors or Western lenders who impose political conditions. China delivers a turnkey system – from panels to batteries to maintenance crews.
The Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) gives this system its diplomatic backbone. Recent action plans commit to expanding solar, wind, hydropower and emerging hydrogen projects, as well as building low-carbon industrial zones. These agreements bind energy development to broader economic cooperation, deepening Beijing’s role far beyond individual projects.
The payoff [sic] for China is clear. Every new installation ties African states into Chinese standards and Chinese supply chains. Access to minerals – cobalt, manganese, graphite – often comes through parallel agreements linked to the same infrastructure projects. In political terms, Beijing positions itself as a strategic development partner – a message that lands well on a continent long frustrated with Western conditionality and slow delivery.
Marcus Vinícius de Freitas, policy expert at the Policy Center for the New South (Morocco), wrote in a 2025 commentary, “African development should follow strategic and not transactional objectives. This is where the Chinese presence in Africa can enjoy a plausible opportunity. By recalibrating from a model of project-driven engagement to one that is genuinely partnership-driven, Chinese investment will match more closely with African strategic visions.”
The new soft power
China’s expansion is political. Clean-energy systems create built-in dependencies that deepen over time. Panels require compatible inverters. Batteries rely on specific chemistries. Smart grids run on proprietary software. Once a country adopts Chinese systems, switching suppliers becomes prohibitively expensive and technically risky.
Beijing reinforces this model through what it calls “small and beautiful” projects – modular clean-energy installations that avoid the backlash associated with megaprojects. Many come bundled with agreements granting Chinese companies access to critical minerals such as cobalt, manganese and graphite. Infrastructure unlocks resources; resources guarantee repayment. The cycle feeds itself.
This form of leverage is not new in global politics. It echoes the classic pattern of oil diplomacy in the 20th century, when control over energy supply chains shaped alliances, dependencies and geopolitical spheres. China is now adapting that model to the clean-energy era, using solar hardware, battery systems and grid infrastructure to build influence where oil once defined power.
African analysts are already highlighting this shift. Fikayo Akeredolu, a researcher on China–Africa relations at Oxford, notes: “Unlike the Dakar Action Plan 2022-2024 (adopted in late 2021) which explicitly mentioned oil and gas, the newest Beijing plan centers on renewable-energy cooperation and clean-energy power supply. It signals a decisive move away from fossil-fuel projects toward a different model of influence.”
Rivals struggle to respond, but even their most ambitious initiatives have failed to match China’s speed, scale or pricing power.
Why no one can keep up with China
The global contest for clean-energy dominance is often framed as a competition of ideas or climate strategies. In practice, it is a competition of capacity – and only one country currently has the scale, supply chains and political machinery required to shape the transition. The United States, Europe, the Gulf states and Russia all have ambitions, but none can match what China has already built.
Washington’s position is defined less by technological limits than by political instability. Under Donald Trump, federal support for renewable energy has been rolled back, environmental programs dismantled, and long-term planning disrupted. Every election cycle resets America’s energy priorities, making sustained industrial policy almost impossible. The U.S. can innovate and subsidize, but it cannot compete with a vertically integrated Chinese system that produces hardware at one-tenth of U.S. prices and ships gigawatts of equipment on demand. Tariffs don’t close that gap. Rhetoric doesn’t either.
Europe presents itself as a global climate leader, yet its energy transition depends heavily on Chinese components – solar modules, batteries, raw material processing, inverters and grid hardware. Attempts to rebuild domestic manufacturing collide with high production costs, fragmented decision-making and years of outsourcing.
Even major players are feeling the strain. In 2025, Volkswagen suspended operations at two German EV plants due to weak demand. Spain had to rely on 2,000 Chinese technicians to launch a new CATL–Stellantis battery facility. Europe has targets and doctrine, but not the industrial depth to execute them independently.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are investing aggressively in African renewables. Masdar and ACWA Power have become major players in wind and solar development. But their strength is financial – project capital, not manufacturing. They do not control the global production of panels, batteries or grid technologies. They can sponsor projects; they cannot reshape supply chains.
Russia maintains a visible – and in some cases strategically important – footprint in Africa through nuclear energy. The $28.75 billion El Dabaa nuclear plant in Egypt is the flagship example, with other projects under discussion in Ethiopia, Niger and South Africa.
But nuclear power is not a mass-deployment solution. It cannot compete with cheap, modular solar systems that can be built in months. Russia’s influence is concentrated and long-term, but not transformative on a continental scale. Every major actor has strengths. None can match China’s ability to deliver the full package: manufacturing scale, low-cost hardware, turnkey infrastructure, financing and political consistency.
The result is a structural imbalance. While the U.S. and EU debate frameworks and incentives, China is wiring entire regions into its energy ecosystem. In this race, speed and scale matter more than declarations. And China has both.
The rise of the ‘electrostate’
China’s clean-energy surge marks the emergence of a new geopolitical model: the electrostate. Instead of projecting power through hydrocarbons or military alliances, Beijing leverages control of the technologies and supply chains that will run the global energy system of the future. In the last century, power centered on oil wells and pipelines. Today, it revolves around silicon, lithium, copper and the infrastructure that transforms them into electricity. China dominates each stage of that chain.
The influence this creates expands automatically. Every solar farm built with Chinese technology requires Chinese servicing and parts. Every battery installed today guarantees future contracts tomorrow. Over time, these dependencies evolve into political alignment and long-term economic cooperation.
International agencies warn that such imbalances threaten global energy security. China hears the warnings – and continues building. Clean energy is becoming a foundation of geopolitical alignment. Countries that integrate into China’s energy ecosystem will rely on it for decades. And Beijing is shaping that system faster than any competitor can respond.
(André Benoit is a French consultant working in business and international relations, with an academic background in France with European and International Studies, and a background in Russia with international management.
Supplement: Four reports recently published in the ‘Ecology News’ headline page of The Multiplural World, with comments by the website editors [in brackets] :
1. Air pollution crisis in New Delhi is a double emergency: public health, and government inaction, report by France 24, Nov 14, 2025 [Germany’s state news service published a report on Nov 12 headlined ‘COP30 in Brazil: Can India lead the Global South on climate?’. No, the report is not supposed to be ironic nor humorous, but it is.]
Note by The Multiplural World: [As with all Western media, the New York Times refers to global warming as ‘climate change’. This is scientific ignorance and is part of the continued effort to deflect attention and delay action away from global warming mitigation measures. ‘Climate change’ is but one of nine planetary boundaries threatened with being surpassed by the workings of the expansionist, capitalist system. Seven of those boundaries have been surpassed by the expansionist capitalist system, which holds the fate of humanity in the iron grip of its laws of development and expansion. The nine planetary boundaries are taught in grade school… or should be taught there. But when it comes to reporting on global warming, the New York Times and the rest of Western, corporate and state media fall short of grade school levels of scientific literacy. Check this out: the New York Times does not include ‘environment’ or ‘climate’ in the 12 subject categories listed on its website home page! The list of 12 does include ‘games’, ‘sports’, ‘cooking’, ‘lifestyle’ and so on. Woe betide us all!]
2. Fossil fuel projects threaten the health and rights of two billion people, warns report by Amnesty International, analysis in Climate And Capitalism (adapted from the report by Amnesty International, Nov 13, 2025 [Like the rest of liberal opinion makers in the West, Amnesty International has backed the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. As a result, Amnesty’s complaints about the environmental consequences of the conduct of the world’s wealthy, fossil-fuel soaked imperialist countries reek of hypocrisy. Amnesty typically lays blame for the global warming emergency and the accompanying imperialist war drive equally at the feet of imperialist aggressors and their victims, if not blaming the victims more than the aggressors.]
3. Despite surging renewables, fossil fuel emissions will hit record in 2025, Washington Post, Nov 12, 2025 In another new report, the International Energy Agency warns that under the current policies that countries around the world are following to meet their energy needs, the planet will warm nearly 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. (Read the Wash. Post report here in pdf format: Record fossil fuel emissions in 2025)
* World Energy Report 2025, by the Int’l Energy Agency (519-page pdf at the weblink)
* Global Carbon Budget 2025 (Press release here (published on Nov. 12, 2025). Emission-rate increases will accelerate in the U.S. and European Union but will slow in China and India, according to the Global Carbon Budget 2025 report, published on November 12
[It is no coincidence that the two groups of countries where fossil fuel emissions are rising non-stop are the same countries waging a three years-plus proxy war in Ukraine, targeting Russia. Those who lead the Western world have deep interests in making this so, while those who should be vigorously opposing that proxy war are sitting on their hands because they are blinded and rendered powerless by deep, anti-Russia prejudices dating back to the years of the Cold War. Emission-rate increases will accelerate in the U.S. and European Union but will slow in China and India, according to the latest Global Carbon Budget report published on November 12. In another new report, the International Energy Agency warns that under the current policies of reckless and limitless consumption, the planet will warm nearly 3 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 and will continue to burn up after that. The increase to three degrees of warming is now irreversible [emphasis added].
4. China’s mega coal-fired power plants are thriving amid its green energy boom, South China Morning Post, Nov 21, 2025 Gansu province is a leading source of solar and wind-powered energy, but cannot yet end its reliance on carbon-heavy power sources (Read the report here in pdf format: China’s mega coal-fired power plants are thriving amid its green energy boom)
