The sceptics among us will say that China is merely playing a sophisticated game. They will argue that Beijing knows perfectly well that the great green mirage is exactly that—a mirage. A fashionable delusion exported westward, eagerly consumed by governments desperate for moral redemption and voters hungry for technological fairy tales. And as long as Western markets continue to absorb container loads of “green” hardware stamped Made in China, appearances must be maintained. The theatre must go on.
There is truth in that.
But it is not the whole story. Not even close.
The primary reason China is carpeting vast stretches of its territory with solar panels and wind farms is not ideological conversion. It is not a sudden epiphany about planetary stewardship. It is industrial gravity. China has built production capacities for solar modules, turbines, inverters, cables, steel, and concrete on a scale so crushingly large that the machines must keep running. Once you erect factories capable of flooding the globe, you cannot politely switch them off without consequences.
Excess capacity is not a rounding error in China. It is a structural feature.
And if there is one thing the Chinese leadership detests more than inefficiency, it is admitting that they placed their strategic bets on the wrong horse. Error is not merely an economic inconvenience in a centralized political system; it is an existential threat. To be visibly wrong would invite doubt. Doubt would invite scrutiny. Scrutiny would corrode the aura of infallibility surrounding the Party. And the sanctity of the CCP is not negotiable.
So what do you do when you have built a solar-industrial leviathan and global demand cannot possibly absorb what you can produce?
You build at home.
You pave deserts with photovoltaic glass. You dot hills with turbines. You erect installations whose primary purpose is not electricity generation but industrial stabilization. The real objective is to keep factories chugging and construction crews employed. To keep balance sheets from revealing too much. To ensure that the narrative remains intact: growth continues, progress advances, the plan unfolds.
Better to consume your own surplus than to admit miscalculation.
The same logic applies to coal power plants, which are still being constructed at a pace that would give Western climate ministries palpitations. Of course, China requires reliable backup. Of course, energy security matters. But it would be naïve to assume that every new gigawatt is purely the product of cold, rational demand forecasting. Planning in China is rarely guided solely by the organic needs of the population. It is guided by the imperative to maintain momentum—and to preserve the story.
Projections can be massaged. Demand can be imagined. Future consumption can be conjured into existence with the stroke of a planning document. If the spreadsheets say growth, then growth shall be built—whether it materializes or not.
This is not incompetence. It is systemic self-preservation.
China plays this game exceptionally well. It understands scale. It understands leverage. It understands how to fuse political narrative with industrial policy so tightly that one cannot be disentangled from the other. The result is a landscape of monumental projects—some useful, some redundant, all impressive.
But impressive is not the same as necessary.
In the end, the green buildout is less about environmental conviction than about absorbing surplus capacity and protecting political legitimacy. It is an economic release valve disguised as ecological virtue.
And like all systems built on narrative reinforcement, it functions for as long as belief holds.
It depends entirely on how strong your wishful thinking is.