At the World Economic Forum in Davos, US President Donald Trump claimed China sold windmills to “stupid people that buy them” and did not use wind power itself. That claim is incorrect. China added record amounts of wind and solar capacity in 2025 and, by some estimates, may have already passed its peak CO2 emissions.
China supplies the bulk of the world’s clean-technology hardware: it manufactures an estimated more than 80% of solar panels, about 60% of wind turbines and roughly 75% of electric vehicles and batteries. Those industrial strengths and rapid domestic deployment have left the United States trailing in many clean-tech areas.
Experts say US policy under the Trump administration—marked by withdrawing from or defunding numerous international organizations and retreating from multilateral climate and energy cooperation—has diminished American influence and ceded economic ground. “On the economic and industrial front, the US has been left behind,” says Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. David M. Hart, a senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the US step back from widely accepted science “foolish” and warned it will harm the country long-term.
Could China become a leading voice on climate action? Domestically, China’s approach has often been “say less and do more,” Li says: it tends to avoid grand international promises and focuses on actions it can deliver. Still, China’s energy mix remains complex. While it has aggressively expanded renewable capacity—adding an estimated 318 GW of new solar and 120 GW of wind in one recent year—Beijing continues to invest in coal. But that coal strategy is changing: rather than relying on coal plants as constant baseload providers, China increasingly uses them flexibly to balance demand, and it has added large-scale battery storage that can smooth grid fluctuations more effectively than coal.
China’s renewables scale is simply massive. Combined grid-connected wind and solar capacity reached roughly 1.8 billion kilowatts, putting China far ahead of peers such as the US and India. Li notes the US installed around 20 GW of wind and solar in that same period while China installed more than 300 GW—“two completely different worlds,” he says. Hart concurs: “There’s nothing in the world that’s even close to it.”
By contrast, the US has been promoting coal under Trump’s policies, including an executive order to reinvigorate “America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” and planned expansion of the coal fleet alongside large gas projects. Those moves reverse previous US momentum toward decarbonization and risk slowing deployment of cheaper renewables.
The gap extends to electric vehicles and batteries. In China, the median new car is an EV; in the US, EV share of new car sales is closer to 10%. China’s transport sector has rapidly electrified, while US policy choices threaten to leave the country an “island of combustion vehicles,” Hart warns. That split has wider industrial consequences: without strong domestic demand for EVs, the US battery and electric motor industries risk higher costs and weaker competitiveness. Tariffs and trade restrictions on solar panels and other clean tech have also raised US production costs—solar manufacturing in the United States can be several times more expensive than in China.
Chinese EVs face effective bans in the US market, and Li estimates at least a decade’s gap in industrial competitiveness across solar, wind, EVs and batteries. The difference is not just market share; it shapes supply chains, costs and downstream industries that will use these technologies.
Economically, the shift toward clean tech has generated jobs. Before recent policy rollbacks, green jobs in the US were outpacing those in oil, gas and coal by more than three to one. Canceling clean-energy investments risks real economic costs compared with growth projected under earlier policies, Hart says, calling the current US stance a “lost opportunity.”
At the same time, China is reframing climate action as an economic advantage rather than a burden. Li points to a rhetorical and strategic shift: Beijing increasingly promotes decarbonization as a growth engine, building industries and exports around renewable energy, storage and electric mobility. That posture—practical, delivery-focused and tied to industrial policy—could allow China to assume greater leadership in global climate and clean-energy transitions even if it does not seek that role overtly.
Edited by: Tamsin Walker
