Description
Over the last decade, green technologies have been deployed at record-breaking speeds across the global political economy. No actor has been more important to this process than China, which now dominates most of these technologies. In this perspective article, we contend that, in effect, China is subsidising a global green transition. While climate policy scholarship provides detailed accounts of China’s state support, it does not capture the critical ramifications of China’s approach to the green transition for other countries. We argue that internal competition within China is increasingly having an impact outside of China. This creates a yet underexplored tension at the heart of climate policy between the ability to compete with China and meeting climate targets. We therefore argue that the implications of Chinese subsidies present dilemmas for the EU and the US and, by extension, avenues for the literature on global climate policy for decades to come.
