In September 2020 Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, told the UN General Assembly that his country would reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions before 2060, and emissions would begin to fall from 2030. Since then, the entire Chinese state infrastructure – from national ministries to local governments – has been working to make that vision a reality.
China is now on track to meet the target of peak emissions by 2030, analysis has found. According to the policy analyst Liu Hongqiao, who looked at provinces’ renewables targets over the course of the country’s present Five-Year Plan (2021-5), China is set to build 874GW of new solar and wind capacity – more than the world’s total 2021 capacity of either wind (825GW) or solar (843GW). China would reach 1,410GW of solar and wind capacity by 2025, more than the EU’s entire 2021 power grid (976GW).
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