China's Two Mountains Theory of Green Industrialization

Discussion

Adam Tooze:

"As recently as the early 2000s China was a chronically power-poor society. Answering that poverty with coal power was an achievement, but it created the world’s greatest pollution disaster. Cleaning that up whilst delivering more and more electricity is a spectacular achievement of development.

Creating a world-leading new industry to produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and EV adds to the success.

This is the achievement of millions of people of all ranks, of workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, of public and private agencies, but as Western observers insistently point out, there was a clear and well resourced industrial policy framework. Backhandedly even Western critics acknowledge Chinese government and party leadership.

So this is not merely a matter of development in general, or ticking the boxes of the UN’s SDR. China’s green energy revolution confirms the CCP’s stewardship.

Specifically, it delivers on one of the personal mantra’s of Xi Jinping:

绿水青山就是金山银山 Lǜ shuǐ qīngshān jiùshì jīnshān yín shān Green Waters and Green Mountains

To an extent that is hard to exaggerate, over the last decade official green modernization has come to be identified with the Xi era. Invoking “two mountains theory,” or liangshanlun (两山论), is part of the common parlance of modern Chinese politics.

The flip side of that dominant ideology is the silencing of any autonomous, rebellious environmental activism.

As Hong Zhang notes in a perceptive recent article in Made in China, comparing the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo Hydropower Project with the highly controversial Three Gorges project of the 1990s and 2000s.

Throughout the 1980s, the Three Gorges Project was the subject of intense debate over its design, feasibility, and potential environmental and social impacts. These were genuine public debates in which opposing voices were heard. … The Three Gorges Project’s final approval in 1992 was shaped by the political aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Premier Li Peng, who played an instrumental role in authorising the military suppression of the protests, emerged politically empowered and used his position to champion the dam (Li 2003). The post-crackdown purge of liberal reformers within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cleared the way for Li to push the project through (RFI 2020). Despite that, when the Seventh National People’s Congress voted on the resolution to develop the project on 3 April 1992, 177 of the 2,633 deputies voted against it and 664 abstained (Xinhua 2009). … In contrast, the LYT project—with an investment cost five times greater and planned installation capacity three times greater than the Three Gorges Project, in a far more environmentally fragile and politically sensitive area—is moving ahead without a vote in the national legislature. It was simply decided and moved along China’s bureaucratic process. In October 2020, the CCP’s Nineteenth Congress passed its ‘recommendations’ for the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan covering the 2021–25 period, which included the ‘implementation’ of hydropower development on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo River (Xinhua 2020b). This was duly reflected in the Five-Year Plan released by the State Council the next year (NDRC 2021). In 2022, the project appeared in the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for Renewable Energy Development, framed as part of a plan to develop Southeast Tibet as a comprehensive base for hydro, wind, and solar energy (NDRC 2022a). In December 2024, the state news agency Xinhua announced that the project has been approved by the Chinese Government (Xinhua 2024). In March 2025, the project was included on the list of national priority projects to be launched within the year (NDRC 2025).

Of course, in their physical footprint, PV panels and EVs are not the same as a giant dam. They are being produced by private firms in highly competitive industries acutely sensitive to consumer demand. But it is undeniable that the panels, wind turbines and EV are also material manifestations of this official ideology of green modernization on the terms set by Beijing itself.

They materialize a vision of China. They are tokens of successfully fulfilling a promise. They also express a sense of collective achievement. They assert common agency: “The world has been talking about green energy for decades. China is delivering.”

Indeed, as far as green electrification is concerned, China can claim an undeniable, almost embarrassingly total claim to world leadership. And of course, this message is broadcast, but it is testimony to the relatively underdeveloped quality of China’s soft power, that the message is as muted as it is.

...

One issue is the fact that China may have succeeded too well. The competitive conditions in the PV industry are intense even by China’s standards.

There is a difficult path ahead. Alongside the extraordinary expansion of green energy, China’s coal build-out has also continued, though at much slower pace. The official rationale repeated in the most recent Ember report is 先立后破 Xiān lì hòu pò (First establish, then dismantle.) aka “Build before break”. This makes sense, but it cannot hide the tough struggles that are to come, as the coal sector is cut back.

The official propaganda that does go on around China’s electrification is in many cases hard for global green narratives to assimilate, because it openly addresses Beijing’s more or less coercive state-building in the “West”, above all in Tibet and Xinjiang.

Energy planning in China is explicitly conceived as spatial planning. This has a technological component and has driven remarkable innovations in long-range ultra high voltage power transmission."

(https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-414-slouching-towards-red)