A wind power farm at Baishuiquan in Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province Photo: Song Yue/PROVIDED TO CSST

Lately, certain Western countries, politicians, and media outlets have frequently hyped up the narrative of “China’s overcapacity,” claiming that the country’s new energy vehicle (NEV) and solar photovoltaic sectors have a so-called overcapacity problem. Ironically, while making unfounded allegations and exaggerating facts, they also continue to intensify crackdowns on China’s sci-tech innovation. These nations accuse the Chinese government of substantial subsidies for NEVs, while they increase their own subsidies to domestic new energy industries.

This double-standard, in rhetoric and practice, proves once more that these Western countries are consistently attempting to maintain their hegemony, just as they used to spread misinformation that China’s advocacy for high-quality “Belt and Road” cooperation aims to transfer excessive capacity.

It should be noted that building an ecological civilization and upholding green development are China’s national strategies and intrinsic requirements for the nation to advance economic structural transformation and upgrade, and cultivate a competitive edge for green, low-carbon industries, thereby realizing high-quality development. This is not what other countries ask China to do, but what China must do.

In recent years, under the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, green development has become a striking feature of China in the new era. Epoch-making revolutions in green and low-carbon technologies, as well as an eco-friendly industrial boom, have significantly enhanced the Chinese economy’s resilience and vigor.

Sustainable development

As the largest developing country in the world, China faces the specific realities of a huge population, sparse per-capita resources, limited environmental capacity, and a fragile ecosystem in the processes of promoting Chinese modernization across the board and building a modern Chinese civilization. It is continuously confronted with the dual tasks of developing the economy and protecting the environment. China’s push to make ecological progress with unprecedented efforts is to fundamentally consolidate the foundation for building a modern Chinese civilization and strengthen the inclusiveness and resilience of economic and social development.

Desertification is one of the most severe eco-environmental problems in the world. To address this problem, China has comprehensively implemented a project which integrates the protection and restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands, deserts, and glaciers. Moreover, it continues to advance large-scale greening, expand the channels for turning the country’s waters and mountains into invaluable assets with emphasis on both quality and efficiency, and strengthen the protection of forest and grassland resources with sound anti-fire work.

As such, China’s forest coverage and forest stock volume have both maintained growth for more than 30 years consecutively, while the areas of desertified and sandified land have both shrunk. These strategic moves and remarkable achievements are results of the Chinese people taking the initiative to continuously translate natural and ecological assets into economic and social benefits, vividly exemplifying Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization. These endeavors have not only enhanced positive economic, ecological, and social effects simultaneously, but also provided powerful support for the national pursuit of high-quality development.

Some Western countries doubted China’s economic growth based on the theory that actual wealth is created out of GDP minus total environmental damage, discrediting its development accomplishments. They chose to turn a blind eye to and downplay the facts that China has contributed about a quarter of the global increase in green areas, that it has unblocked the pathway to turn lucid waters and lush mountains into invaluable assets and vice versa, that it has broken the “binary fallacy” concerning economic development and environmental protection which has persisted for hundreds of years in Western industrial civilization, and that it has unified the theoretical logic and development practice of “the more it develops, the more it protects, and the more it protects, the more it develops.”

In fact, from 2012 to 2021, China sustained an average economic growth of 6.6% with only a 3% average increase in annual energy consumption. During the same period, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP dropped approximately 34.4%, and energy consumption per unit of GDP fell 26.4%. These trends have placed China among the world leaders in decreasing energy intensity.

Thriving eco-friendly industries

A good eco-environment is the fairest public good and the most inclusive form of public wellbeing. Starting from making every aspect of the people’s life and production greener, China strives to let the people enjoy environmental benefits and create a pleasant eco-environment to satisfy their demands. When focusing on solving prominent environmental problems that would damage the people’s health and wellbeing, the country has provided more high-quality ecological products, spurring green and low-carbon technologies to make innovative breakthroughs, so that eco-friendly industries have become the biggest highlight of China’s economic development in the new era.

While creating a blue sky, green landscape, and an environment with clear water for the people, China has managed to replace old growth drivers with new ones. To realize targeted and science-based pollution control and comprehensively improve the modernization level of eco-environmental governance, breakthroughs in key and core technologies have been achieved in such fields as synergistic and in-depth remediation of many pollutants in industrial fuel gas, ultra-low emissions from power plants, whole-process control of water contamination, and automation and intelligentization of environmental monitoring. Therefore, new industries and business formats like smart cities, green and low-carbon architecture, green transportation, eco-agriculture, rural e-commerce, and rural tourism have flourished.

In particular, China has proactively integrated eco-environmental governance deeply with emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, and even 6G, opening up new arenas for the digital ecological civilization. Thus eco-friendly industries have become the leading growth points for China to develop new quality productive forces.

Reflecting on industrial civilization

With increasingly severe ecological crises triggered by the industrial civilization and the historical evolution of humanity itself, particularly its deepening knowledge of nature, the Earth, and the universe, the ecological civilization championed and practiced by China represents a reflection and criticism of the industrial civilization, and characterizes Chinese modernization.

In the new era, the Chinese economy has made historic achievements and undergone historic changes first because the government has carried out supply-side structural reform to redress distorted factor allocation and alter the development model which relies excessively on increasing resource consumption, extensive scale expansion, and sectors marked by high energy consumption and heavy carbon emissions. In so doing, the traditional heavy-chemical economy “landed softly,” rendering null the claim that the Chinese economy’s “hard landing” would be unavoidable.

Furthermore, emphasis has been placed on pursuing high-quality economic development, especially by developing new quality productive forces, to reshape development drivers through innovation and green transformation. In 2023, China’s GDP reached 126.0582 trillion yuan, up nearly 25% compared with 2020. This result was achieved by vigorously developing non-fossil energy, and promoting the efficient consumption of renewable energy after China announced the dual goals of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality to the world, fulfilling its responsibilities as a major country.

Inspiring human advancement

The great accomplishments in promoting ecological progress and green development were secured in the largest developing country in the world with more than 1.4 billion people, accounting for nearly 20% of the world’s population. These advancements were also made in the grand historical narrative of Chinese modernization characterized by harmony between humanity and nature.

To be more specific, China has not only painted the Earth with more “Chinese green” and enlarged the global green landscape, but also profoundly influenced and changed the historical track of the traditional industrial civilization, setting off a new round of revolution in the development history of humanity.

Data from the International Energy Agency shows that global annual renewable capacity additions increased by almost 50% to nearly 510 gigawatts in 2023, and China contributed more than half of the additions. In 2022, China’s renewable energy generation was equivalent to a reduction of 2.26 billion tons of domestic carbon dioxide emissions. Its exports of wind power and photovoltaic products helped other countries reduce emissions by approximately 573 million tons. The two figures add up to 2.83 billion tons of emissions reduction, or about 41% of the global total of carbon emissions reductions due to renewable energy.

This means that compared with the development path of the industrial civilization and the modernization path of Western capitalist countries, Chinese modernization is the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature, and the modernization of peaceful development.

Western countries’ rhetoric regarding “China’s overcapacity problem” is simply another version of the “China threat theory.” The aim is to slander, suppress, and hinder China’s development. The ecological civilization, originating from China, is an objective reality and represents a new trend of human advancement.

Huang Chengliang is a research fellow from the Research Institute for Eco-civilization at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.