China's green century: Strategy, vision and the road to climate leadership

"Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets." Chinese President Xi Jinping first spoke these words in 2005, standing in Yucun Village in Zhejiang Province, China, surrounded by hills stripped bare by decades of mining. This sentence, now known as the "Two Mountains Theory," was not a slogan but the opening statement of a long-term national strategy, and whose outcomes are now reshaping the global order.

However, China's emergence as the world's foremost clean energy power is not a recent development. It is the product of deliberate, decades-long policy architecture, built on the conviction that ecological civilisation and economic development are not competing forces but complementary ones. That conviction, embedded in Xi's Two Mountains Theory, has driven every major energy and environmental decision China has made since the early 2000s.

The investment figures that have followed are a testament to that consistency. According to Carbon Brief and the Global Government Forum, China committed more than US$625 billion to clean energy in 2024, exceeding the combined renewable energy investment of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States that same year. Its renewable energy generation capacity has more than tripled over the past decade, reaching 1,876,646 MW in 2024, with solar energy expanding 20 times beyond its 2015 levels. In early 2026, China installed the world's first 20-MW offshore wind turbine, with mass production of 50-MW designs planned from 2027. These are the results of patient, state-directed investment.

On May 14, 2026, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell travelled to Tsinghua University in Beijing and delivered an assessment of where that investment has led. China, he said, is a leader in climate multilateralism and has been integral to roughly halving the projected global temperature rise over the past decade. That statement reflects a trajectory Beijing has been pursuing all along.

Xi's Two Mountains theory holds that ecological health is not a constraint on development but its very precondition. "Don't expect to promote economic growth at the cost of the environment, "Xi said in 2005, "because such growth doesn't equal development." This was both an economic and environmental position, a recognition that long-term prosperity depends on the integrity of natural systems. It is a philosophy that has since been codified, institutionalised,and scaled with the full weight of the Chinese state behind it.

In March 2026, China passed its landmark Environmental and Ecological Code, consolidating over 30 separate environmental laws into a single framework combining pollution control, ecological protection, and climate action. In the same month, the National People's Congress adopted the 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026 to 2030. The Plan targets a 17% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), raises the share of non-fossil energy to 25%, and allocates US$550 billion for grid modernisation.

It targets 100 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 and introduces mandatory Scope Three emissions reporting at stock exchange level, making China one of the first major economies to require this degree of corporate climate transparency. The Plan also shifts national governance from controlling energy consumption to controlling carbon emissions directly, with a commitment to reducing economy-wide emissions by 7% to 10% from peak levels by 2035.

For Africa, particularly Kenya, this strategy carries direct significance. The 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly frames affordable clean-energy technologies as global public goods available to developing nations. China's green cooperation framework with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), built on technology transfer and financing, has been identified as a replicable model for the Global South, backed by US$5.2 billion in energy-related greenfield projects across Southeast Asia between 2019 and 2023.

The strategic clarity of China's green agenda is no longer in question. From a village in Zhejiang in 2005 to a US$625 billion annual clean energy programme in 2024, the line is straight and deliberate. Lucid waters and lush mountains were never just a metaphor; they were always a plan.

The author is a PhD scholar in international relations based in Nairobi, Kenya.