Is China's lead in clean technologies insurmountable? How will the Trump presidency shape relations with China? And when will China's emissions peak?
Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, has said that 'almost every energy story is essentially a China story. But it's a complicated story that has been powered by vast supplies of coal. China's economy has grown rapidly, with per capita levels of energy consumption now matching Europe's, making it the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses.
At the same time, China has increased the share of electricity and total energy to around 28% thanks to a rapid uptake of electric vehicles and increasing use of electricity for heating domestically. If it continues on its current trajectory, it is likely to peak its greenhouse gas emissions from energy in the next few years, if it hasn't done so already. China is also playing an increasing role beyond its borders: In 2023, 20% of the global EV export market belong to China, and it dominates the battery, solar and wind industries.
This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington sits down with Professor Qi Ye, Director of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who's had a ringside seat during China's rapid shift towards a clean energy economy. Together they unpack the complex dynamics shaping the global energy transition in China. Discover the remarkable scale and pace of China's clean energy transformation, the challenges of international collaboration, and Professor Qi's vision for a new era of climate leadership.
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QY
We have seen these complaints about EVs and solar and batteries with them. This is a very interesting complaint, as I see it. This, it's a little bit like… Okay, you are entering a race and you say, ‘Hey you just run too fast. Can you slow down a little bit?’ Let's just start over the game. You don't ask them to slow down, you just catch up.
BW
Well, just to take your analogy of sports a bit further, there have to be some rules, right?
QY
The fact is, in many different areas like these EVs and stuff, China has caught up now. It's really important to realize you're facing different competitors now, and we're in a very different world.
BW
Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. While the drama of the US election was unfolding, I was in China, and for this week's episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor Qi Ye, a climate policy veteran who's had a ringside seat during China's rapid shift towards a clean energy economy. As Fatih Birol, Head of the International Energy Agency, has said, we're now in a world where almost every energy story is essentially a China story. And it's a complicated story. Powered by vast supplies of coal, China's economy has grown rapidly, with per capita levels of energy consumption now matching Europe's, making it the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses. Decades of investment in hydro, solar, wind, cleaner coal and nuclear has reduced the carbon intensity of China's power grid to around 560 grams per kilowatt hour. And at the same time, it's increased the share of electricity in total energy to around 28% thanks to a rapid uptake of electric vehicles and increasing use of electricity for heating domestically. China is likely, if it continues on its current trajectory, to peak its greenhouse gas emissions from energy soon. And increasingly, it's also playing a role beyond its borders. In 2023, for example, 20% of the global EV export market belonged to China. As Professor Qi and I discussed, while not everyone is happy buying clean technologies from China — the US, Europe, India all are imposing tariffs to keep cheaper products out of their markets elsewhere — mutually beneficial partnerships are being developed as countries embrace the opportunity to become more self-reliant in energy using cheaply manufactured solar cells, batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps. As Professor Qi points out, we’ll only win on climate when the clean energy revolution is as widespread as the industrial revolution it seeks to replace. Whether and how quickly this can happen is still very much an open question, but we do now have access to low-cost clean energy, and this changes the game. To discuss all this and more, please join me in welcoming Professor Qi to Cleaning Up
BW
Professor Qi. Thank you so much for joining me today. Really looking forward to this conversation, and I wanted to begin as we always do, by introducing yourself and telling us what you do?
QY
Well, I'm a professor. I teach environmental policy and climate change policy, currently with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou. It's a new campus, and we started this new area of study that we call Thrust, a Thrust of carbon neutrality and climate change. And we actually have a whole area that we call the society hub, including some other areas like innovation, policy, entrepreneurship and financial technology, urban governance and design. So that's what I do.
BW
Fantastic. And we first met in 2015 when you were involved in a report that the Foreign Office had commissioned on climate risk, and at that point you were at the Brookings-Tsinghua Public Policy Institute. Is that right?
QY
Well, 2015 was the second year I joined the Brookings Institution as a Senior Fellow, and I was directing the Tsinghua Centre for public policy. I was also a professor in the School of Public Policy and Management in Tsinghua University.
BW
And that report, I remember that report very well, because it was an international effort to consider climate change from the perspective of risk. How do you see climate risk? What was important about that report? Why did you feel the need to do that report back then?
QY
Well, let me just give you a little bit of background about that work. This was September 2013 and back then, Sir David King just took on the position as a special envoy representing the British government. And he caught some of us, including Dan Schrag at Harvard University, he's a geologist working on this long term climate change, of course. So I was quite surprised that me, trained as an ecologist working on climate change, we never actually look at this issue of risk in the kind of perspective that they — David King, Simon Sharp — they're looking at. It was very surprising, in a way, that climate change was a risk and this can actually cause tremendous damages and interruptions to our life and also to the future generations in so many different areas: the ecosystem, biodiversity, and you know, the ocean, the atmosphere, climate, everything, everything will change. Public health… It’s something that we have witnessed. So we got together and we began to look at what we are so used to doing on climate change. And everything turns out to be quite fresh, you know, from this perspective. So we're thinking about… we no longer just look at the so-called scientific time, typical fact and truth. Rather, we want to look at this thing as how this would affect our lives, affect our ecosystem, our climate.
BW
And just to unpack that a little bit more essentially, by taking a risk framework, you're not looking at averages or the most likely scenarios, you're also taking into account the less likely but really damaging tail risks — the more extreme — so that you can try to reduce your exposure to those less probable but very impactful risks.
QY
Exactly right? I like the way you put it. We actually call it low probability but high impact. This would be something like when we're buying our insurance, right? You buy insurance for your house and for, say, fire hazard, and you do not look at that as an average. You look at it if something like that happens, can you afford it? Can you deal with it? If not, how much are you willing to pay for that kind of potential risks? So that's something you know, we normally do not as scientists, we normally do not look at climate change risk that way, right? We look at the averages, and we look at the most likely scenarios and what would happen. So that's quite, quite a big difference.
BW
And so if you took more of a risk-based approach, what would be the practical changes that we might do? Could it affect public policy?
QY
If we took a well… you certainly would take this climate risk a lot more seriously than what we are doing so far, right? What we're doing… Like last week, when UNEP released its most recent Gap Report, and it’s very unfortunate that using the current policy in all different countries and that will lead us to roughly 3°C of temperature rise by the end of this century, rather than 2°C, and not to mention the 1.5°C. That's something we expect, just following the policy that we have been doing right now. But if we take this risk approach, we'll see 3°C — and this is a likely case, by the way — can we afford it, what kind of damages and loss will we be facing?Then we probably will reflect on whether or not those policies are actually appropriate. And now this will also take us to the next step, 3°C based on that unit report is the average. Then, if we take that to the extreme, to something that's possible, maybe not likely, but possible, maybe 4°C, maybe 5°C, right? Then (if they realise) that kind of scenario is something that is possible, they will probably take further steps to reconsider whether or not what we have been doing in responding to climate change, and we probably have to take a lot more proactive approaches.
BW
And just to unpack that, iIt's not so much to do with our understanding of how quickly we might be able to change our energy systems. It's to do with the inherent uncertainties of climate responses, that there are certain things we just don't know how the planet will respond to these elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, these elevated temperatures, the potential for tipping points. It's all of those uncertainties that gives you the range. Is that correct? It's not that we think we're going to burn millions and millions of tons of coal. It's just that the system itself is hard to predict.
QY
I think that range of uncertainty has to do with two different sets of the variables. The first set of variables is this natural variability, right? Then, let's say you have a sequence of actions, then nature will respond in a certain way, and that response will bring in some kind of uncertainty. So that’s a generic response from nature. There is a range of uncertainty back. The second side of the variable is our understanding of what's going on, right? Our understanding may be incorrect, imprecise, and then that also brings in a certain level of uncertainty. If we take this path to consider the possibilities of action, possibilities of policies, whether or not you can take that, that's probably adding another layer of uncertainty. For instance, now we're talking about climate change policies, and one of the major emitters in the world is the United States. We know for sure there will be a new president, but we do not know who that person is.
BW
Well, I’m sure we'll come on to talk about politics in a second. Because I should say too that we're recording this in China just days before the US elections. It's the subject of a lot of conversation. Here we are in Nanjing, and the topic of the conference that we're at is, ‘how do we speed a global transition to a clean energy system?’ And a number of people have quoted Fatih Birol, the head of IEA, in saying that the global transition, energy transition, is a China story. Is that how you view it? Is it a story about China?
QY
Well, I don't really know the context of that, but I think China certainly plays a very important role in many different areas. You know, like solar and wind and EVs and batteries. And in these very different areas, China has a bigger share of the market and has a different lead in the technology and their particular deployment. In that sense, I think China is playing a very different role. But energy transition is not a story for a single country, even for China. Energy transition must take place in every corner of the world, and it takes the whole world working together to make it happen, just like what happened in the UK 200 years ago. The industrial revolution, when we started burning coal to drive these big pieces of machinery, right? It was only when this kind of technology spread beyond the UK, beyond Europe, and it goes all everywhere in the world, then we have this global industrial revolution, and we have a different world. To transition away from coal, from fossil fuels, to achieve the kind of energy transition we want, it takes every country to work together.
BW
Work together? Or maybe perhaps slightly compete with each other? Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair, but it seems at the moment we're entering a period where there's a bit of a race going on, a little bit of distrust creeping in. So is it about competing or collaborating?
QY
That is the type of competition we'd love to see right. Racing to the top rather than racing to the bottom. We have so much racing to the bottom already. 15-16 years ago, when we saw this earlier generation of entrepreneurs, when they started working on solar panel technologies and companies, we saw that kind of a competition among the different kinds of companies. They're all trying to be the number one, the most efficient, therefore the most profitable companies back then. For instance, in Wuxi, Suntech, back then, was the leader in this industry. Then later, we see that the leader is replaced by the late comers. Yingli, then later LDK, and now we have many more companies working in that area. In this competition among the different companies, in this competition among different research groups for higher and higher efficiency of conversion of solar energy, we’ve almost reached this theoretical physical limit of efficiency. Now this is exactly the kind of competition we would like to see. Because we really need this kind of competition.
BW
And the effect of that is, of course, that the costs have famously come down now to such a point where it's the cheapest possible (form of electricity generation).
QY
Exactly. We speak of a learning curve, right? This is really amazing. It's really amazing. But, you know, 10 years ago, even five years ago, if you were talking about solar, when you say, ‘this will be cheaper than a coal fired power generation,’ probably very few people would would believe that is the case.
BW
Yeah, here we are with now gigawatts going in every year, it's amazing. The price is amazing, but what would you say to people who would say: China's benefited from this competition, or this kind of directed competition. There's a plan in place. There are government targets. The companies compete, but with the effect of probably undermining or taking jobs away from, say, Germany or the US, where they had also had manufacturing of solar that couldn't compete on the global stage. And there's been a bit of a backlash against this idea that there are no manufacturing jobs in other parts of the world. They're all in China, right?
QY
Well, this, this just reminds me of the early days when China just started opening up. A lot of people back then were complaining, it's basically, ‘Oh, it's too expensive.’ China imported a lot of equipment back then from Japan, from Europe, from the United States. And now things have changed. I think this is a process of industrialization, a process of transfer of technology. And there are winners and losers. When China started this whole thing of the solar PV industry, most of the technologies were transferred. And then we started spending a lot of money to buy the silicon, I mean, the equipment to process the raw materials and stuff. And then over time, and because of the scale of the market, because of the technology, because of the cheap labor and cheap environmental cost, it gradually, step by step, to achieve where they are right now. And in this process, it's really not without cost. We know this is an extremely energy intensive industry. And back then, if you asked, let's say, the people who are complaining now. If I say, ‘Okay, let's put this industry in your hometown in Germany or in Japan,’ probably not that many manufacturers want to do this. It's extremely energy intensive. It can be, it can be quite polluting in many, many different regards. So it is not a simple win. There have been huge costs to the process, including the cheap labor, right?
BW
I mean, we could have a conversation about some of the accusations about the labor conditions but maybe, rather than go there, perhaps it's also worth reflecting on the fact that for China, this was seen as a way of gaining a new market. That was going to be a future market that no one yet controlled, and that there was a really clear imperative for China in that the demand for energy was rising very fast, and there wasn't that much in the way of domestic energy sources. Only coal. So let's just look at electric cars, for example. Right? That was clearly a strategic decision to try to make energy more secure, more domestically controlled, rather relying on imports, right? And other countries didn't take that approach, the US had its own oil and gas.
QY
Yeah, you're talking about this labor condition, the way I look at it, it is not just labor conditions, it's more like in the economy, when you are at a certain stage of development, at that particular stage, the labor cost, the environmental cost, the cost for energy and other resources are different. They're just simply different, with the salary levels, so on and so forth. They're just different. Now, the EV is a very interesting story. This was not an immediate success at the beginning. It also took the industry a long time, it took the government a long struggle, and in this whole process, there were a lot of problems. Problems dealing with subsidies, for instance, how will you design the subsidy so that you actually incentivize the purchase and incentivize the manufacturing innovation of EVs. There were a lot of problems, and now we tend to see more on the successful side of the story, rather than the, say, the failed side of the story.
BW
Yeah, I guess it was a complicated story.
QY
It is a complicated story.
BW
But here we are today, where one in every two cars sold in China is electric. And where you're based now in Hong Kong, I believe it's even higher.
QY
It's even higher in the so-called Greater Bay area, in these areas: Hong Kong, Macau and nine cities of Guangdong. And that's because it's a warmer area, and has much better facilities in terms of the infrastructure over there. And people love to drive the EVs in that area. They're a lot more open, and they pursue different kinds of fashion. They consider it to be cool to drive electric cars, a lot of young people there. Yes, that's certainly the case.
BW
And the production now of electric cars in China has reached a really high level, hasn't it? There are factories producing a million cars a year and more?
QY
Yeah, take BYD, the leader of EVs here in China. Last month, in October, they sold half a million cars. It's one company, and the previous amounts, in September, they sold more than 400,000 cars. It's quite amazing.
BW
I think possibly people can't quite understand the scale of how this transition is happening so fast in China. They might be underestimating it. When do we think China's demand for oil might peak? Because clearly, it's a measure which will ultimately result in less imports of oil? Is there any data?
QY
Yeah. Oh, I love that question, because when I was a student and we talked about peak oil — right, the so-called Hubbert Curve — when we're talking about that, we're actually talking about the peak production of supply. And now we are talking about this with the hope that one day we will get rid of petroleum and no longer use it. The peak is really hard to predict, and I made some mistakes in predicting the coal peak a number of years ago.
BW
I think everyone's been caught out by that...
QY
It didn't really happen as I predicted. I thought 2013 would introduce a plateau, and now it's a bit higher than that. But just like that, I would imagine the oil peak will probably come in the not so distant future, and probably also in a way that you come to a high level and stay there for a number of years before it's actually declining, and hopefully declining quickly. Oil is a little bit different to coal in that a lot of oil is actually not just used as a fuel, but also as a material for, for manufacturing and petrochemicals. So it will probably take a bit longer before we see a quick drop for petroleum.
ML
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BW
China's got this sort of head start in a lot of the technologies we're going to need for this global transition. But what we've seen now from the West is the desire to provide a bit of space for them to catch up. And so tariffs are being applied to the products: the solar panels and the electric vehicles. How is that perceived, and does that change anything about China's plans?
QY
I think it really depends how we're going to approach this. I do believe China, both the government and the business sector, really want to have collaborations, you know, with Europe, with the United States, and other other countries. And I've seen businesses, who want to have manufacturing sites in the US, for example. And I've seen some deals they have tried to make, say the electric vehicle companies, they are setting up their manufacturing sites in Europe. And also, of course, you know, joining research and development facilities. I think these kind of measures would be very good for different countries, these international collaborations. And certainly, I think this will be the way to go, because China's clean energy industry certainly benefited a lot, hugely from the west, from the technologies in the early days. And if you know, there is something that China can do in a way similar to say, 20 years ago, with a solar industry, with the wind industry, with batteries and EVs, certainly it would be something that's very important to see.
BW
I think there's, there's something of a distrust, unfortunately, about the final product coming from China, the software or the devices within the vehicles. There is a little bit of a distrust about surveillance, I mean, ironically, because we're all being surveilled everywhere in Europe and the US already, but about having China have your data. There's a nervousness about that.
QY
I know, and I know this kind of thing has been speculated for a long time, and especially right now it’s not the best time for this kind of final product transfer. But still, I don't think it's impossible. For instance, Tesla set up probably the largest super factory here in China, in Shanghai, and despite the fact that there is a deep distrust between the US and China, Tesla is flourishing very well. And in the past, I heard that some of the government would not allow Tesla’s to enter into the government sites. But now even Tesla is welcome everywhere. And I know this kind of surveillance and even spying right. What was it, this was a number of years ago when, you know, we heard the story that some country was even, you know, taking thes secret videos or audio of some of the conversations of the European leaders back then. Fortunately, this was there. I have not seen stories between China and Europe or that China has been doing things like this. So I can definitely understand the concerns, and especially with the current geopolitical situations, but I don't think that should prohibit further collaboration.
BW
I'm just thinking about the finished product of even software like Tiktok. It's excited a huge debate about how much Tiktok is gathering about people's behaviors.
QY
I know this Tiktok thing in the United States, I just had a recent visit there, and I was asking, I said, ‘Hey, I still see Tik Tok is going around.’ And there are a lot of talks in the Congress, in the government, but the young kids, they don't care. They’re still playing. Again, I think the technologists are very smart. They can discover, they can just play Tik Tok and discover whether or not there are problems with that kind of software. It shouldn’t be too difficult to examine that.
BW
And then enforce it? So I wanted to change tack slightly and go back to sort of international climate change. And one of the things that we've seen recently was the Paris Agreement, which was seen as a success, really, of US-Chinese collaboration. And I wondered how it was viewed from China. What was China's reaction to the Paris Agreement and role that you saw China playing in that.
QY
China sees the Paris Agreement as a major success in international climate governance, and to develop the consensus between these major parties for reaching the international agreement, is indeed very, very difficult to do. It's a milestone. It was considered to be a milestone. Just remember the days before the Paris Agreement, and in November 2014, exactly, exactly 10 years ago, when President Obama and President Xi got together in Beijing. They had a major announcement on a US-China Agreement on climate change and clean energy. Then the next year, September 2015, the two heads of states got together in Washington, DC. That's a joint presidential statement. And there were China-France, China-UK, China-Europe, that kind of bilateral agreement before the Paris Agreement. So it was a diplomatic success, and it was also a major success for the environment, certainly. So I think China takes significant pride in the Paris process. And China, ever since December 2015, China has been working, and even for this year, you know, next week, going to Baku, it's still repeating that we should stick to the Paris process, to the Paris Agreement. So China’s taking this very, very, very seriously.
BW
But just to question a little bit the fact that now we have a largely voluntary system where targets are set according to nationally determined contributions, and China's now committed to carbon neutrality by 2060. That might all seem like a success, but how do we hold ourselves accountable to those targets?
QY
Well, this is something about the agreement itself and to the international negotiation process. The Paris Agreement was not a, it was not something that was designed to have this binding mechanism. It is a voluntary system based on these nationally determined commitments. From the analytical point of view, you may see this as some kind of design flaw there, that's a different story, that's the treaty itself. That does not really mean that the agreement itself is not successful. It only means that this agreement, whether or not this agreement, is able to fix the problem that we would like to fix. I see that from the political point of view or from the analytical point of view, we probably have different conclusions of that.
BW
Because, as we said at the beginning, the climate risk is not going away. It’s getting much worse. And in a sense, our climate talks now, haven't got any… What are we going to be negotiating for going forward? What's the next thing for our negotiations?
QY
I think that's the most important question. The question is not about reflecting one particular agreement or one particular conference, then it is this overall governance system to deal with climate change. We should ask ourselves this question: Does this international climate governance actually work? On that, I am one of the pessimists. Seeing this process has been going on for the last 30 years, now, more than 30 years, then we have definitely achieved a lot, and we have built a lot of agreement and we’ve built a lot of clean energy in the meantime, but we are farther away from the target to control the temperature rising. We're farther away. We're not getting closer, we're getting farther away. So in that sense, I think in our governance we need to reflect on the efficacy of this governance system. And I think we have some serious problems with the current system.
BW
And so thinking about upcoming conferences, we've got one in Baku coming up. What would good look like? What new work streams could we then kick off?
QY
Each party is now actually already expressing what they expect, what they hope and what they wish to come up with this COP. But the thing is, just like the Gap Report, right? You can say, ‘okay, assuming we can achieve all of this, can we actually deliver that 2°C degree or 1.5°C degree target? I think that's probably a more fundamental question we should ask ourselves. Or we should ask our negotiators, assuming you can achieve your target, say, on the financing, on technology, updating the new commitment, can we achieve our target? Right now we're talking about a temporary rise, a likely temporary rise of 3°C. So the current framework and the current system probably, or in my view, most likely, would not be able to bring the result below a 2.6°C or 2.8°C temperature rise.
BW
What could we do differently? Do we need to have more sectoral approaches? We talked in the past about the fact there are other UN treaties that exist. We have the Montreal Protocol that controls certain types of gasses. We have ICAO that looks after the aviation sector. Are there other places where we could have different types of agreements? Could we do more through those? Is that something we should be thinking about?
QY
Actually, I somehow have high hope with the younger generation now, and hopefully they will now just rise up and take the responsibility to carry over.
BW
Is that fair though for us to say that it’s on their shoulders.
QY
Well, I understand we have this older generation of climate negotiators and activists, and they have made a significant contribution to this process. But the thing is that we need some fresh blood in this process. And we need this young generation, because they will carry all this. You know, the consequences, after all. And I would like to see more participation from them. And for them to bring in their agenda. They are actors in this. And I think that that's the future of a new climate governance. Otherwise we know these friends, right? They have been working on this, some of them run out of their energy. Some of them run out of ideas.
BW
There are other ways in which countries collaborate. There are bilateral agreements between countries. How does China, for example, view Brazil and the emerging economy of Brazil, where you are trade partners, and there's a lot of commerce that passes between the two?
QY
Sure. Yeah, no, I think the collaboration between these two countries, Brazil and China, can have a great prospect in the future. And yesterday, you and I were talking about this, this aviation deal, for instance? And you can't really rely on China to come up with the production of this zero-carbon aviation fuel, in any near future for you to replace that. But Brazil can do that with much lower cost and it’s actually feasible. Just to look at the vast landmass and the climate, the experience that they have and the infrastructure. They probably can do this with a much lower cost. It's just one example.
BW
And so in that example of a bilateral collaboration, you might see Chinese electrification technology reducing demand for bioethanol for cars, and then the bioethanol goes into aviation, where China would be a buyer of that.
QY
Yes, I think in an ideal world that would be great, and vice versa. And China can work with Brazil to also electrify some of the automobile industry as well. But you know their automobiles rely a lot more on biofuel, which is great, but still, there is potentially a good application of electricity in the EVs.
BW
And Brazil has largely clean electricity at the moment as well.
QY
Yes, yes. Brazil is a major country with this extremely high level of biodiversity and natural forest and the Amazon and the plant and animal species. And I think we also need to think about how best to preserve those precious resources and the value of ecosystems. I think that's also important in the process of responding to climate change
BW
Absolutely well. We touched on earlier, but we are just days away from an American presidential election, and I'm curious as to how China is viewing that race. Is it something that's talked about? It's certainly been talked about in this conference. How can we respond to the fact that we're going to need to continue to see global leadership on climate change, and what’s the kind of expected response if we got somebody in the White House who doesn't believe in climate change?
QY
Well, in 2016, shortly after the new president emerged, the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement. I think from the Chinese perspective, we certainly wish to see someone who stays in the Paris Agreement for this process. And as I said, China takes the Paris Agreement very seriously, very seriously. Secondly, China, as I see it, would be keen on working together with the United States in developing these technologies for clean energy, for adaptation and mitigation of climate change, and in many other areas as well. The US is by far, leading in so many different areas of technology, including clean energy, including AI technologies and so on and so forth. And you know so far, there's a small yard-high fence, kind of discussion of strategy from the US side. And personally, I would like to see a lot of collaborations and working together. I understand there are certain areas where you have concern for national security. But for those areas which you can clearly see beyond this small yard, and I’d like to encourage those areas to work together.
BW
What do you think the likelihood is of the ‘race to the top’ really being a race to the top and not a race to the bottom, if we have a change of direction in the US?
QY
Well, earlier you talked about this clean energy area. Then we have seen these complaints about EVs and solar and the batteries. This is a very interesting complaint, as I see it. It's a little bit like entering a race and saying, ‘Hey, you just run too fast. Can you slow down a little bit?’ Let's start the game over. We can actually play this game just like we play it in the Olympics. And we have seen a great Olympics in Europe earlier this year, and I would like to see that kind of spirit play out in this area dealing with climate change and clean energy, right? Rather than asking them to slow down, you just catch up.
BW
Well just to take your analogy of sports a bit further. There have to be some rules, right? Because what the Olympic Committee would say is, you're not allowed to use drugs, you’re not allowed to cheat. So is there any justifiable criticism where you think the West is right? China's been cheating a little bit and needs to perhaps slow down to acknowledge the fact that this has to be a fair race?
QY
I know this year there were lots of complaints about Chinese swimmers, which later proved to be unfair and unfounded. That was interesting. So the fact is, in many different areas, like swimming, like this EV stuff, China has caught up now. I think it's really important to realize you're facing different competitors now, and we're in a very different world. It's very, very important to adjust to this new situation. Just accusing the competitor of cheating doesn't help. You know, that does not help. So I think we are in a very different world. And in this new world, we actually can work together in a very positive and productive way, right?
BW
Well, I'm glad that you've got that hopeful message there. I mean, I suppose in real terms, things could change. The trade barriers could continue to go up, and we could go back to a smaller world, a less trade-oriented world. But then China has the natural advantage of a huge domestic market that it also can just continue to invest in for its own sake. And then, in a sense, what the rest of the world does, although it might slow China's plans down, you still have this ability to think long term. You're trusting in science, and you have a domestic market to develop products to sell into. So does that mean China can just continue to run the race?
QY
I think what you said is all right, but this is a very interconnected, globalized world already, and you probably can go back on globalization a little bit. But I think the overall trend is that we are growing into a more and more interconnected world, and China cannot do well without close collaboration and cooperation with other countries. And we should really take advantage of this interconnectedness.
BW
So that was Professor Qi Ye, Director of the Public Policy Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. As usual, we’ve put relevant links in the show notes, and my thanks go to our videographer, Shiyao Zhang, Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our editor, and the growing number of people that together make the Cleaning Up Podcast and the Leadership Circle possible. Join us next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.
ML
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