China is a troubled giant, and its decision-makers — Xi above all — need stories the population can understand and believe in. Showing the world how big, important and sophisticated China is serves that purpose. It feeds the China narrative. The rulers need breadcrumbs for the population, small signs that the great machine is still moving in the right direction.
But opium for the masses is not the only reason the Dragon wants this jamboree.
There is another, rather more tangible problem that China needs to be seen doing something about.
China has built extraordinary production capacity for almost everything that can currently be labelled “green”. Solar panels, wind turbines and their components. The steel, plastics and concrete required to build them. Batteries, electric vehicles, processing equipment — the whole machinery of the green industrial complex.
The scale is difficult to comprehend. China has built production capacity capable of supplying not merely its own transition, but enough to cover the planet with supposedly green energy several times over.
And what is the worst thing that can happen when you have sunk hundreds of billions into producing something?
Nobody needs it.
That is the uncomfortable problem.
Industrial capacity does not disappear simply because the assumptions that justified building it turn out to be wrong. Factories remain. Supply chains remain. Workers remain. Capital remains trapped in equipment that still needs to be fed, operated and depreciated.
But the bill does not necessarily come due immediately.
It can be postponed for quite some time as long as there is hope. As long as there is hype. As long as governments continue announcing new targets, new subsidies and new green-energy packages.
And, conveniently, many of those packages require somebody to buy the very things China has spent hundreds of billions learning how to produce at extraordinary scale.
That makes the green transition rather more than an environmental project from Beijing’s perspective. It is also an enormous industrial absorption mechanism.
The hype gets another fillip from hosting COP. The speeches are made. The commitments are renewed. Western nations are encouraged to approve another round of green investment. More solar. More batteries. More electric vehicles. More infrastructure. More of the machinery China has already built.
Everybody gets a story.
China gets demand for its factories. Western governments get another opportunity to demonstrate their environmental virtue. International institutions get another conference. Investors get another narrative about the future.
And the underlying industrial overcapacity gets another lease on life.
The show must go on.
Not because everyone necessarily believes the story anymore, but because too many people have become economically dependent on keeping the story alive.
Until they are not.
But until that moment arrives, every straw will be clasped.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/08/22/climate-change/china-host-2028-un-climate-talks/