Europe should recognize China’s green rise primarily as a technological reality and a partnership opportunity

The outline of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) for national economic and social development was approved by Chinese lawmakers at the closing meeting of the fourth session of the 14th National People’s Congress on March 12. The plan is built around several priorities, among which is steering the development of new quality productive forces. It is an economic philosophy that rejects growth for its own sake and demands instead that expansion be driven by genuine technological and environmental advancement. At its core, the plan rests on two mutually reinforcing pillars: green technology and artificial intelligence.

According to the National Energy Administration, by the end of 2025, China had installed the largest electric power system ever built by any civilization in history. China added 315 gigawatts of new solar capacity and over 119 GW of new wind power capacity last year alone. To put that in perspective: 315 GW of solar is roughly 12 times the entire electricity grid of Bangladesh, 10 times all the hydropower Norway has ever built, and 23 times Nigeria’s total functioning grid capacity. China added all of that in a single year. In 2024, renewable capacity additions accounted for 86 percent of all new power installations in China, and in early 2025, for the first time, China’s total installed clean energy capacity across solar, wind, hydro and nuclear combined surpassed fossil fuel power capacity. It is estimated that most of the additional electricity demand in the Chinese economy last year was met by clean energy sources.

The story behind these numbers is not just one of government mandates and national planning, though those matter enormously. It is also a story of ordinary entrepreneurs who made extraordinary bets. Take Tongwei Solar as an example. This company began in Sichuan province in the 1980s as a fish farming operation. Its founder Liu Hanyuan developed a technique for raising fish in flowing water channels that became standard practice across China. Then, in the early 2000s, he looked at his ponds and asked a simple question: What if the surface of the water could also generate electricity? The answer was elegant in its simplicity: Solar panels mounted above fish ponds, electricity generated above, fish raised below. The panels shade the water, reducing evaporation. The fish thrive. The electricity feeds the grid.

Today this model is replicated across millions of acres in Jiangsu province, Zhejiang province and beyond. And Tongwei, the fish farming company from Sichuan, has become the world’s largest solar manufacturer. This story is worth knowing, because it explains something important about how China’s green revolution actually works. It was not only planned from above. It was invented from below, by people who see opportunity where others see only ponds.

The next wave is already forming. Chinese battery manufacturers are now producing sodium-ion cells that maintain stable performance at -50 C, temperatures at which conventional lithium batteries become nearly useless. Chang’an Automobile will begin selling sodium-ion vehicles in mid-2026. CATL’s ultra-fast charging battery, meanwhile, can replenish from empty to full in 12 minutes, with a rated lifespan of 1.8 million kilometers, six times the current industry average. Solid-state batteries that could push single-charge range up to 1,500 km are entering pilot production lines at BYD, CATL and several automakers.

The connection between this green infrastructure and the artificial intelligence revolution is direct and structural. The latest data from the National Energy Administration showed that China consumed 10.4 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2025, the first time any single country has crossed that threshold. Much of the new demand came from data centers, AI training clusters, intelligent manufacturing systems and electric vehicle charging networks. Elon Musk said at Davos in January that the global AI industry faces an energy bottleneck everywhere except China. China is the only major economy building clean power fast enough to simultaneously fuel both its traditional economy and its AI expansion.

The green revolution is not merely an environmental strategy. It is the physical infrastructure on which the AI age is being constructed. This is what Chinese policymakers mean by new quality productive forces. The two revolutions are not separate tracks; they are the same track.

None of this should surprise Europe. And yet Europe continues to treat China’s green rise primarily as a trade problem rather than a technological reality and a partnership opportunity. Europe faces a genuine competitiveness challenge that its leaders are only just beginning to acknowledge honestly.

European solar manufacturing has largely withered. The wind turbine industry, once a point of European pride, now faces competitors offering equivalent or superior products at prices about 30 percent lower. The battery industry’s flagship hope, Northvolt in Sweden, has faced major setbacks. In two years, the European electric vehicle sector shed thousands of jobs, partly because of US tariffs on European exports and partly because the underlying competitiveness gap is real.

The political pressure indeed exists to respond with tariffs and trade barriers. But that path does not lead where European leaders want to go. It slows the green transition, raises costs for European consumers and does not close the technological gap. It merely postpones the reckoning. The more honest conversation was put bluntly by a senior Airbus executive. Europe, he said, needs thousands of joint ventures with Chinese companies. The logic is straightforward. If European companies partner with Chinese manufacturers, they gain access to the most competitive supply chains in the world, they learn the production methods and quality disciplines that have made Chinese green technology so formidable, and they can manufacture green products in Europe for European and global markets. If they do not, they will increasingly become rule-takers rather than rule-makers, importing technologies on terms set by others.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz led a high-level business delegation on an official visit to China in February. During the visit, CATL and BMW signed a memorandum of understanding on battery passport and decarbonization. This was not sentiment; it was strategy. CATL and BMW have been partners since 2012, and their relationship is deepening, not retreating. Serious European companies understand something that political rhetoric often obscures: the green transition will succeed or fail on the basis of technology and economics. China possesses the technology, the supply chains, the manufacturing scale and the cost curve. Europe offers the market, the regulatory standards, the engineering tradition and the institutional trust. These are not competing assets; they are complementary ones.

I am sometimes asked whether Europe and North America can simply replicate China’s model, building their own vertically integrated ecosystems, coordinating government, industry and research institutions the way China does, catching up through national mobilization. The honest answer is no, not in the same way. China’s approach reflects decades of institutional development, a particular relationship between State planning and market competition, and a capacity for coordinated ambition at scale that grew out of specific historical experiences. Europe’s strength lies elsewhere: in rule of law, open standards, democratic accountability and the diversity of its member states’ industrial traditions. These are genuine assets. But they call for a different strategy, one of deep engagement and integration rather than imitation and isolation.

The author is the chair of the Europe-Asia Center and the former under-secretary-general of the United Nations. 

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.