China and climate change
China plays a critical role in the global climate change landscape, primarily due to its status as the world's most populous nation and a major emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs). With a population exceeding 1.4 billion and a rapid economic expansion since the late 20th century, China's energy demands have surged, leading to significant increases in CO2 emissions. The government has implemented various policies to address environmental concerns, including the establishment of national action plans on climate change and ambitious targets for reducing emissions by 55% by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
Historically, China has struggled to balance economic growth with environmental stewardship, often prioritizing the former due to the need to alleviate poverty. Various five-year plans have set goals for energy efficiency and pollution reduction, yet enforcement remains challenging. The use of coal as a primary energy source complicates efforts to transition to renewable energy, despite investments in hydroelectric power and solar energy. China's commitment to international treaties like the Paris Agreement reflects an evolving recognition of its environmental responsibilities.
As the nation continues to grapple with the dual challenges of economic development and climate change, its strategies will significantly influence global efforts to combat environmental degradation. Understanding China's approach offers valuable insights into the complexities of addressing climate change within a context of rapid economic and social transformation.
China and climate change
Historical and Political Context
The major factor in the global production of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and in general environmental degradation is the massive growth in the world human population, and China is home to a substantial portion of that population. From 400 million people before World War II, China’s population had grown to over 1.4 billion by 2023. Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the new government focused on rebuilding the nation and growing the population. In the face of Mao Zedong’s philosophy of controlling and shaping the environment to serve a new generation, it was difficult at first for population scientists to convince the government that there was a need to constrain growth.
It soon became obvious, however, that progress in literacy, food production, and modernization was undermined by uncontrolled population growth. Mao agreed first to a two-child policy and then to a one-child policy, limiting the number of offspring allowed to each family. These policies were enforced only for the Han Chinese; ethnic minorities have never been limited in their number of children. It is estimated that without the one-child policy, China’s population would be greater by over 300 million—a number approximately equal to the population of the United States. The Chinese standard of living would be dramatically lower, and severe stresses would be placed on food supplies, living conditions, and energy. The nation would have added over 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) to its annual emissions.
Management of environmental issues in China has modified and expanded since the first National Environmental Protection Meeting in 1973. In 1982, the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environmental Protection was established. The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) was established in 1988 and upgraded to ministry level in 1998. The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) was established in 2008. On March 28, 2008, the MEP established five regional inspection offices with a total staff numbering under twenty-six hundred, compared to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s seventeen thousand personnel.
The State Council of the People’s Republic of China issued the China National Environmental Protection Plan in the Eleventh Five-Years, 2006-2010. That five-year plan set forth a goal of achieving 20 percent greater energy efficiency and a 10-percent decrease in pollutants. China’s officials acknowledged that the need for sustaining economic growth could take precedence over environmental concerns and weaken enforcement of environmental regulations. Lu Xuedu, deputy director of the Chinese Office of Global Environmental Affairs, explained that “You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions.” Economic arguments are not restricted to China. Because coal is much cheaper than oil and natural gas, Japan and Europe also make greater use of coal. China followed this plan with the National Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for Eco-Environmental Protection, 2016-2020.
In 2024, the country released its National Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021-2025). This action plan singled out industries with high CO2 emissions and energy consumption such as petrochemicals, steel production, building materials, and non-ferrous metals. It set clear targets to reduce CO2 emissions within these sectors. China hoped these actions would help it meet its first major climate target in 2030, which was to reduce emissions by 55 percent. It next planned to reduce emissions by 66 percent by 2035 from 2023 levels. It hoped to achieve net neutrality by 2060.
Impact of Chinese Policies on Climate Change
The China National Environmental Protection Plan in the Eleventh Five-Years, 2006-2010 by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China has directed over one percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to environmental protection but considers the environmental situation “still grave.” It laments that there were no breakthroughs in areas that should have been addressed before and directly blames ongoing problems on the lack of observation of laws, minimal punishments for lawbreakers, and poor enforcement of environmental laws. The most successful controls have been those cutting sulfur emissions, which ironically reflected sunlight back into space and therefore counteracted global warming. Thus, by decreasing acid rain, China has increased the greenhouse effect.
In contrast to American trends, China has avoided the rush to develop corn ethanol and other biofuels that could in any way displace foodstuffs for human consumption. China has concerns over food security originating in the nation’s history of hunger and famine. Biofuels from nonfood plants, oilseeds, and an experimental Jatropha curcas plant are being considered, but great caution is being exercised to avoid soil erosion or reducing the number of food crops.
In 2012, China brought online the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Three Gorges Dam, a source of clean energy. Its twenty-six generators produce 700 megawatts of energy each. The dam’s total 18,200 megawatt output is equal to that of fifteen of the largest nuclear power plants. It was designed to generate up to 10 percent of the country’s power needs at the time of construction, but China’s energy needs are rapidly increasing. The World Bank refused to fund the dam, and the United States led a boycott of bank funding for the project. China nevertheless built the massive dam based on the need to control devastating floods, generate clean power, and also bring ocean freighters to the interior industrial city of Chongqing.
China has provided subsidies to companies producing solar photovoltaic systems. Photovoltaics, or solar panels, are carbon neutral once they have been produced. However, as a source of electrical power, their costs have not yet dropped to a level where they can compete with natural gas or coal, a point called “grid parity” in China, and many solar units are shipped to Germany and other countries. General estimates are that solar power would have to drop to 14 cents per kilowatt hour to be economical in China. Contemporary costs run near 40 cents per kilowatt hour. The 2008 surge in oil prices provided the expectation that the cost of such alternative fuels would soon come close to competing with fossil fuels. However, the subsequent global economic downturn also dramatically reduced the price of fossil fuels. The point at which solar power would become as cheap as fossil fuels, once optimistically thought to be as early as 2012, was deferred.
Many companies that make photovoltaics are located in China in order to take advantage not only of cheaper labor but also of cheaper land and materials. New buildings in Guangdong and other developed areas are being designed to use solar panels to provide their complete energy needs. The main market for Chinese solar panel production is in Europe, where regulations and subsidies promote the use of this more expensive power source. China itself remains cost conscious and is not ready to substitute more expensive power sources for cheaper coal plants. The need to serve the poorer population in the less developed countryside takes precedence.
Silicon, a central ingredient in solar cells, is also critical to the semiconductor industry. The solar industry has exceeded the semiconductor industry in its use of silicon. China has provided various electrical engineers with millions of dollars in start-up funds to establish state-of-the-art solar photovoltaic system factories in Wuxi and several other cities. Research has reduced the amount of silicon needed to produce solar cells. The economic downturn has also decreased the costs of silicon. Improved technology, much developed in China, is increasing the efficiency of silicon electricity production.
In 2016, China joined 194 other countries in signing the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change. The treaty committed China to cutting emissions, investing in renewable energy, and reducing coal use. In addition, the country pledged to become carbon neutral by 2060. To that end, they banned the construction of new coal-fired power plants between 2016 and 2018, however, after the ban was lifted, China resumed building new plants, building more than three times more new plants than the rest of the world combined in 2020.
China as a GHG Emitter
China was the first developing country to establish a national policy for addressing global warming, releasing its National Action Plan on Climate Change in June 2007. According to the International Energy Agency, China surpassed the United States in CO2 emissions in 2009. China’s dramatic economic expansion since 1980 has pulled 400 million of its citizens out of poverty, but it has likewise increased per capita use of energy, especially visible in the nation’s rapid adoption of automobiles. The increase in energy demand in developed regions has required China to enter the global market as a major player, negotiating the purchase of major shares of oil from Kazakhstan and other nearby fields.
While China is the second-largest consumer of oil at 15.148 million barrels per day in 2022, the United States leads at 20.246 million barrels per day. As is true of the United States, China has limited and rapidly declining domestic oil reserves. According to the World Factbook, China had reserves of 26.023 billion in 2021 while the United States had oil reserves of 248.941 billion in 2022.
With substantial coal reserves, China has used many smaller power plants located near population centers to deliver power locally with less lost to transmission. The nation has begun requiring, however, that larger plants be built that are more efficient and use less coal per kilowatt-hour produced. China’s main strategic energy reserve is coal. National energy consumption is so great that it also imports coal from Canada and Australia.
China’s largest joint venture with Royal Dutch/Shell was a project in Ningxia to produce 70,000 oil barrels equivalent of methanol per day. Methanol is added to gasoline to produce a cleaner burning fuel. The National Development and Reform Commission established standards for coal-to-liquid (CTL) methanol, allowing the fuel to be used and projects such as the one in Ningxia to go forward. China was the first country in the world to develop methanol as an alternative fuel. The Chinese employ oxygenated gasification, a process developed with some US government funding in earlier years, to isolate CO2. This allows China to either sequester the CO2 or use it to increase oil production from older wells. However, Shell left China in 2024, the year when China began construction on a $290 million green hydrogen plant in Ningxia.
A growing source of Chinese carbon emissions is the increase in motor vehicles. In the last few decades, government policy has promoted automobile production and encouraged the growing Chinese middle class to buy cars. The initial rationale was that the production, repair, and maintenance of cars would drive economic growth and reduce poverty; pollution control was deferred until after economic benefits had been realized. However, China has since established fuel-economy requirements for new car production that are more rigorous than those of the United States.
Compared to over-the-road trucking, rail is far more efficient for moving products cheaply with fewer emissions. By 2020, China had 141,400 kilometers of rail network and plans to expand to 200,000 kilometers by the end of 2035.
Summary and Foresight
China’s rapid economic growth has generated concern that the energy demands of such a huge population, if it grew to the per capita usage of the United States, would produce sufficient pollution and GHG emissions to represent an ecological disaster. However, the lifestyle of the new Chinese middle class retains a conservation ethic that may prevent runaway consumption. China combines economy and conservation of energy by using passive solar water heaters and has a long history of employing public transportation, bicycles, and electric bicycles to travel. In addition, the crowding of a large population requires severe limitations on pollution and provides a public awareness of the need to conserve and protect the environment. As a result, the government has begun aggressively recognizing and responding to the problems of global warming. China’s ability to implement such policies is tempered by the need to pull half of its population, primarily in the countryside, out of poverty.
Key Facts
- Population: 1,425,887,337 (2022 estimate)
- Area: 9,826,630 square kilometers (several border areas are in dispute)
- Gross domestic product (GDP): $17.4 trillion (purchasing power parity, 2022 estimate)
- Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in metric gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e): 10.2 in 2019
- Kyoto Protocol status: Ratified, 2002
- Paris Agreement status: Ratified, 2016
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