Nearly 18,000 kilometers from the sleepy town of Arayat in the Philippines, the United Nations’ annual climate change conference has descended on the city of Belem, deep in the Amazonian heartland of Brazil.
Many of the thousands of delegates to COP30 likely won’t be familiar with Arayat, in a province some 100 kilometers north of Manila, but its relatively flat terrain and the local climate make it ideal for solar panels, and it is home to hundreds of them.
Perched near a mountain, the rows and rows of panels provide physical evidence of the dilemma facing participants at the COP30 conference who are struggling to inject momentum into efforts to slow global warming.
The panels all come from China, now the world’s leading provider of green energy technology, at a time when global efforts to tackle climate change have been undercut by US President Donald Trump, who labeled it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at the U.N. General Assembly in September. The US is not expected to send a high-level delegation to the COP30 conference and last month concerted US pressure against a plan by the International Maritime Organization to introduce a global carbon tax on shipping—branded a “scam” by Trump—resulted in a vote on the measure being postponed for a year.
While China leads the world in supplying green tech, it is also the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. Observers question whether it can fill the vacuum currently developing around leadership of the fight against climate change against a broader backdrop of deepening tensions between China and the US over trade and security.
“There’s a difference between being a leader in multilateral climate action and being the clean energy factory for the world,” said Jennifer Schuch-Page, managing principal at strategic advisory firm The Asia Group.
To move climate goals forward, there needs to be more than just an industrial policy of churning out panels and electric vehicles, said Muyi Yang, senior energy analyst for Asia at think tank Ember.
“You also need institutions to govern, and which will design and strengthen the institution to provide necessary resources and to help set agenda,” he said. “All these things cannot be done by China [alone]. To assume a greater leadership role, I think China also needs to learn how to do that.”
But the solar power plant in the Philippines is just another reminder of the dominant role China now plays in the energy transition efforts in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia, with its cheap solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles permeating through the region.
China’s investment in clean energy has been immense. Beijing poured more than USD 625 billion into it in 2024, almost double the amount in 2015, and a third of the global total, according to the International Energy Agency. It now produces more than 70% of the world’s EVs, over 80% of its solar panels and Chinese companies are some of the leading wind turbine manufacturers.
The panels at Arayat are part of a solar farm owned and operated by domestic firm Citicore Renewable Energy, one of the youngest players in the Philippines’ nascent renewable energy market.
“We believe that Chinese renewable energy technology has come a long way, and their support has enabled players like us to scale up at an unprecedented rate,” a spokesperson for Citicore said. “Its technology is among the most cost-competitive, logistically viable. And they can swiftly deploy their equipment and technical support.”
The day after Trump’s blast at the UN General Assembly, Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time unveiled a detailed target for reducing his country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time,” Xi said.
Still, Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific project, said Beijing’s new 2035 climate target was “disappointing,” given it was already set to achieve the target with policies already in place and will not further drive down emissions, although China does have a track record of underpromising and overdelivering on its climate promises.
The project said the pledge by China, which is still building new domestic coal-fired power stations, to hit peak carbon emissions before 2030 was “highly insufficient” to achieve the Paris Agreement commitment adopted in 2015. Parties to the agreement set a goal to limit the average global temperature rise to well below two degrees Celsius this century, ideally keeping it to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level that UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, in the run-up to COP30, conceded the world will inevitably overshoot.
Beyond the setting of numerical targets, the main intended function of the Paris Agreement’s structure is to boost ambitions to counter climate change. China’s weak official target provides a clear example of how it has not yet stepped up to the plate as an international leader on climate policy.
But purely on a manufacturing level, French bank Natixis estimates that at the current rate, “China can already produce enough renewable products for the world’s energy transition,” and will face overcapacity after exporting to global demand.
Experts say China’s massive production of solar panels has been the single most important factor in bringing down global solar panel prices, making them affordable for developing nations. At the start of this millennium, solar panel prices were more than USD 6 per watt, but they have now fallen below USD 0.3 per watt, according to Our World in Data.
China shipped solar panels worth USD 1.6 billion to the 11 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the nine months through September this year, an increase of nearly 40% from a year ago, according to estimates from Ember.
China’s influence is evident across Southeast Asia.
The Philippines, despite being entangled in territorial disputes with Beijing over parts of the South China Sea, has begun developing Southeast Asia’s largest photovoltaic solar project with state-owned PowerChina last December.
In Indonesia, construction began in September on a 192-megawatt peak capacity floating solar power plant developed by state-owned power company PLN at a site near Bandung in West Java. China’s Gezhouba Group is undertaking the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC).
Meanwhile in Laos, the Monsoon Wind Power project—Southeast Asia’s largest onshore wind farm—came online in August using Chinese-made wind turbines, and had Chinese state-owned PowerChina handle EPC.
“Were it not for the Chinese EPC, it would have been extremely difficult to find anyone to deliver this under schedule and under the budget,” said Nat Hutanuwatr, CEO of Impact Electrons Siam, the Thai renewable energy company spearheading the project.
Lucio Pitlo III, president of the Philippine Association for Chinese Studies, said Beijing “gained a lot” by leveraging its tech advantage as “soft power” since their investments are present across every part of the supply chain in the energy sector.
“China could frame this as part of their green silk road,” he told Nikkei Asia, noting that it used to be easy to pinpoint which projects are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“That’s not the case now,” Pitlo added.
In contrast is the fading US imprint. Prior to Trump taking office for the second time and slashing foreign aid, the US “had led with a full spectrum of technical assistance and capacity building programs, from on-the-ground energy projects to large-scale investment mobilization and building a pipeline of bankable projects,” said The Asia Group’s Schuch-Page, who was a senior climate official in the administration of previous US President Joe Biden.
Instead, Trump has ended US involvement in the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) initiative, a multilateral program the US helped launch to support developing nations shift away from coal to clean energy. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank estimate that the withdrawal “impacts over USD 3 billion of US commitments in Vietnam and Indonesia, mostly commercial loans.”
In Vietnam, the US is now pressing Vietnam to use liquefied natural gas as a transition fuel between coal and renewables, as Trump looks to sell more American hydrocarbons abroad under his “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
And as US support for green transition wanes, developing Asian countries are increasing their reliance on China’s renewable energy technology, and that could prove to be a “double-edged sword,” said Altynay Junusova, an analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.
“Chinese investment now dominates Southeast Asia’s solar photovoltaic and battery sectors, creating both economic opportunity and strategic dependence,” she said. “And with Western markets closing or imposing tariffs, countries in Asia increasingly find themselves tied to Beijing, a ‘silver bullet’ for energy modernization that comes with a heavy price.”
“By investing in EVs, solar panels, batteries, and hydropower, and by nearshoring supply chains, China strengthens its economic grip, sets standards for green technologies, and secures long-term commitments from recipient countries, including loans and repayment obligations,” Junusova said.
“In many cases, these countries have little choice, as they don’t have alternative sources of capital, technology, or expertise—sectors where Beijing holds an advantage, and must balance Chinese investment with their own economic and green development goals.”
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.