China, the UK and Net Zero

Relying on a rival

Is China an enemy state? This is a question ministers struggle to answer as Beijing breaks treaties, sanctions our MPs and puts Muslims in concentration camps. If any other country did this it would bring outrage. China gets away with it because they are also our fifth-largest trading partner, a major investor and one of the world’s two superpowers.

Nowhere does this contradiction bite harder than in climate policy. The UK has set itself ambitious goals: a decarbonised power system by 2030, Net Zero by 2050. But meeting those goals means building vast amounts of clean energy infrastructure, and much of that depends on China. Solar panels, wind turbine components, batteries, and critical minerals all flow from Chinese supply chains. There is unease in government about this dependency, but also quiet recognition that Net Zero cannot be delivered without it.

For four years I advised ministers and senior officials on the UK’s energy and climate policy toward China. Now, at Britain Remade, I spend my time arguing for faster, cheaper delivery of the clean energy Britain needs. Over the next few weeks I will use this series to focus on the questions that decision-makers I advised have to face and the trade-offs of much of what we want to build in Britain being reliant on parts made in China.

Some of the answers are actually straightforward. Whatever Net Zero sceptics claim, Chinese green goods are genuinely green. The country’s solar panels and turbines may carry a higher carbon footprint than those made in Europe, but the difference is small, and tiny compared to the emissions from burning fossil fuels. Even the “dirtiest” Chinese renewables are an order of magnitude cleaner than gas.

Another straightforward question is whether we can achieve our Net Zero targets without relying on China. No we can’t. Over 80% of our solar panels originate there, even when the paperwork says otherwise. Wind turbines assembled in Hull are full of Chinese-made gearboxes and magnets. Our EV batteries depend on Chinese materials and companies, and our planned gigafactories rely on Chinese investment and supply chains. China isn’t just part of the supply chain, it is the supply chain. Nuclear is the only major exception.

How did this happen? Not through genius or conspiracy. China’s rise in green manufacturing follows a pattern seen before in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. It combined an East Asian industrial model with the advantages of a vast, unequal, middle-income economy. It has workers at every wage level, engineers at the global frontier, and an enormous domestic market that grew just as green industries were taking off. China didn’t outthink the world; it outscaled it. And while that model cannot easily be replicated here, there are lessons for Britain in how East Asian countries supported their most innovative firms, especially in nuclear, where our own approach has too often buried success under red tape.

Geopolitical risks are real but manageable. Britain has so far avoided being caught in the crossfire of the US’s tariff wars and the EU’s protectionism, benefiting from cheaper Chinese hardware without being drawn into confrontation. The deeper question is one of balance: how much risk from dependence on China are we prepared to tolerate to avoid the volatility of fossil fuels? Both come with costs. Gas prices can spike overnight; supply-chain shocks unfold slowly. The real challenge is not eliminating risk but deciding which form of it we can live with.

A far greater danger would be allowing Chinese companies to operate critical infrastructure in the UK, which would hand them massive leverage. The government is right to have drawn that red line in nuclear, and it should apply the same logic to renewables and grid assets, where allowing Chinese companies control could potentially give them the power to cause blackouts on a regional or even potentially a national basis at will.

For all its contradictions, China is also indispensable to global climate progress. It emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, but it is also building more renewable and nuclear capacity than the rest of the world combined. Its leaders genuinely care about climate change, but never more than they care about energy security, affordability, and industrial power. When those priorities align, China moves faster than anyone else; when they don’t, coal wins. That pragmatism has made clean technologies cheaper and more abundant, accelerating the global transition even as China’s own emissions kept rising.

The UK, by contrast, has the opposite approach: we’ve made Net Zero a moral project rather than an industrial one. Our energy prices are the highest in the developed world, and our planning system makes building anything painfully slow. China’s example shows what happens when you treat cheap, secure energy as the foundation of a green transition rather than a side effect of it. If Britain wants to lead by example, we need a relentless focus on cheap power.

China is both the cause of and the solution to many of the climate’s problems. Understanding that paradox, our reliance on a rival, our dependence on its success, and the risks and rewards that come with it, is essential if Britain is to reach Net Zero without losing its economic footing along the way.

Michael Hill is a Policy Researcher at Britain Remade. He blogs at Catching Mice.