When Donald Trump declared at the United Nations that climate change is “the biggest scam in history,” he vacated a symbolic space of environmental leadership that China immediately occupied. But Beijing’s gesture is not born of altruism or a green epiphany, but of fear. It fears that its last industrial bastion, the only sector where it retains any technological advantage, will crumble if the West abandons the climate panic game. Because if climate change loses relevance, who will buy the Chinese solar panels that are left over in Shenzhen warehouses?
China produces 70% of the world’s electric cars, 92% of solar cells and 98% of photovoltaic components. All of its industrial overcapacity, that old Achilles heel converted into a global dumping strategy, is directed at sectors that depend on global warming remaining an unquestionable dogma. The Chinese State needs climate conferences to continue declaring emergencies and for Europe to ban combustion engines. It also demands that the United States subsidize the transition because all that remains of the old export machinery is that: a desperate bet to sell the world its energy reconversion, designed, assembled and financed by Beijing.
The paradox is obscene since China is responsible for about 30% of global emissions and opens coal plants as if they were bakeries. However, now she presents herself as a champion of the clean planet. The collapse of its real estate sector, the fall in external demand, the technological war with Washington and international financial distrust left Beijing without many cards. And there is only one left: export the ecological transition as before it exported t-shirts. And if the world doubts climate change as an economic engine, all that scaffolding wobbles.
Therefore, when Trump ironizes about climate fraud, what shakes is the environmentalist consensus as well as the Chinese industrial substitution model to survive the new cold war. Xi Jinping’s climate leadership is actually a business strategy wrapped in an environmental narrative. China is not leading the fight against climate change; leads the monetization of climate fear.
Just as in other times the Communist Party used Marxism as a shield to legitimize powerful interests, today it uses environmental rhetoric to shield its new export model. There is no ideological conviction. There is ideological opportunism. The China that burns coal while preaching green energy is the same one that criticizes imperialism while colonizing half the planet with debt. The contradiction is not a mistake: it is the plan.
Chinese leadership on climate issues should not be read as a gesture of civilization, but as a survival maneuver. If the world becomes convinced that Trump is right and that the climate is not the imminent apocalypse that justified buying anything green, the Chinese industrial dream becomes a financial nightmare. And then, again, Beijing will have to reinvent itself. This time, without speech to disguise it.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international issues like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast El Observador Internacional, available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
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