‘China opportunity’ gives the lie to ‘China threat’ narrative

In the current global landscape, the balance of power is undergoing profound adjustments, and international narratives are in a state of intense reconstruction. Historically, Western-dominated international discourse has often viewed China’s development through a biased lens, with the “China threat” theory rooted in geopolitical anxiety and Cold War thinking, persistently distorting the international community’s objective understanding of China’s rise. However, as global governance deficits deepen, particularly in areas critical to humanity’s shared future, such as the energy transition and climate change, China is gradually dismantling these outdated prejudices by providing substantial public goods. From exporting inexpensive goods to offering “green solutions”, China’s development of new quality productive forces is reshaping the global governance landscape, driving a historic shift in international narratives from the “China threat” to the “China opportunity”.

In the past, the “China threat” narrative often portrayed China’s vast manufacturing sector as a source of global environmental pressure. However, as carbon neutrality has become a global consensus, China’s comparative advantage in manufacturing has become the greatest opportunity for the realization of the global green transition. China is not only a “stabilizer” of global supply chains but also a “key engine” for the universalization of green technology.

First, Chinese manufacturing has significantly reduced the global cost of renewable energy. Leveraging economies of scale, technological iteration and full industry chain integration, China’s photovoltaic industry has driven down the costs of solar power generation by over 90 percent in the past decade, with similar trends in wind power and energy storage technologies. This sharp cost reduction has the attributes of a global public good, making clean energy no longer a luxury for developed countries but an affordable choice for many developing nations, providing the material foundation for leapfrogging green development in the Global South.

Second, China provides indispensable resilience support for the global green supply chain. Amid geopolitical conflicts and the fragmentation of global supply chains, China’s leadership in fields such as photovoltaics, wind power and power batteries offers stable expectations for the global energy transition. Despite noise of “de-risking”, the facts have proved that China’s robust green industrial capacity is not “excessive” but rather the “ballast” that fills the gap in global green supply and ensures the continuous supply of critical equipment.

Third, China’s vast market scale provides a demonstration for green technology innovation. As the world’s largest market for the production and sale of new energy vehicles, China is not only advancing its own transportation sector’s decarbonization but also setting a benchmark for the global automotive industry’s electrification transition. China’s breakthroughs in the “new three” products — electric vehicles, lithium batteries and solar cells — have accelerated the global industrial technological innovation. In this process, China has transformed from being a “problematic party” in carbon emissions to a “solution supplier”, a significant opportunity that cannot be ignored in the context of global sustainable development, despite being viewed as a challenge by some countries in a geopolitical context.

Western media has often perceived China’s initiatives to establish new multilateral institutions as challenges to the existing international financial order. However, the pragmatic practices in green finance by institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have effectively countered these doubts, laying the institutional foundation for the “opportunity” narrative.

The AIIB’s practice demonstrates China’s capability and willingness to be a builder of international institutions. On the one hand, the AIIB maintains high operational standards, with “lean, clean and green” as its core values, and its governance structure has drawn from and optimized the best practices of existing multilateral development banks, consistently earning top international credit ratings. This indicates that the institutions advocated by China are not closed geopolitical tools but open, professional international public goods, serving as a beneficial supplement to the current global financial governance system.

On the other hand, the AIIB has internalized green development as an institutional norm, committing to climate financing, which accounted for 50 percent or more of its operations by 2025, and ceasing the financing for coal-related projects. Faced with trillions of dollars of funding gap for the global energy transition, the AIIB not only provides valuable additional funding but also forms complementary cooperative relationships through co-financing with institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. This institutional contribution transforms China from a misinterpreted “revisionist” to a key “co-builder” in the global green finance landscape, bringing tangible development opportunities to developing countries in dire need of green capital.

The highest level of narrative reshaping lies in the leadership of norms and ideas. In the field of climate governance, China is transitioning from passively adapting to rules to actively shaping agendas by setting ambitious national goals and advocating new cooperation concepts.

First, China’s dual carbon goals have been an anchor of stability in global climate governance. China’s commitment to peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 is a rigorous and unprecedented timeline. As the world’s largest developing country, these self-imposed constraints provide the necessary hard deadline impetus for the country to realize net zero emissions, helping the world achieve the temperature control targets of the Paris Agreement. They also offer clear and stable policy expectations for global green investors.

Second, China promotes the green transformation of the Belt and Road Initiative. By launching the Green Investment Principles for the BRI and announcing a halt to new overseas coal power projects, China is actively supporting green energy development in partner countries. This proactive normative upgrade marks China’s effort to make “green” cooperation a new mark of its external economic cooperation, driving global infrastructure construction toward low-carbon and sustainable directions.

Third, the concept of a community with a shared future for humanity transcends zero-sum games. Notably, China’s Global Development Initiative, which explicitly prioritizes “climate change and green development” as one of its eight key areas of cooperation, together with the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative, constitutes a systematic response to global governance deficits. This combination of industrial contributions, institutional provisions and normative leadership not only practices the concept of “shared security” but also provides a new philosophical framework and action guide for transcending the traditional Western geopolitical competition perspective to build a just and equitable global climate governance system.

The reshaping of global narratives is a long-term, complex and contested process. Currently, the “overcapacity narrative” regarding China’s green industry and the trend of securitization in trade protectionism indicate that the old “threat” narrative still has legs. However, facts speak louder than words. In the critical fields of the energy transition and climate governance, which concern the future of humanity, China has solidified the practical foundation of the “China opportunity” by providing global public goods across industrial, institutional and narrative dimensions.

The shift from threat to opportunity fundamentally reflects China’s historic leap in its role in global governance: from a peripheral participant to a core builder, from a source of problems to a key provider of solutions. Although the road ahead is fraught with challenges, as long as China continues to pursue high-quality development and closely aligns its modernization process with addressing common human challenges, the notion of “China opportunity” will undoubtedly become a broader consensus in the international community, injecting more certainty into an uncertain world economy.

Zhang Xiaoxi is a research fellow at the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Cao Hui is an associate research fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.