The world’s two largest economies are making opposite bets on how to power the future — and both bets carry enormous risks. China is racing to dominate clean-energy industries while still leaning heavily on coal.
United States is rhetorically doubling down on fossil fuels even as its private sector keeps pouring money into renewables. It’s tempting to frame this as a morality play — one side enlightened, the other reckless.
The reality is more consequential: we are watching a contest over who gets to build the industrial infrastructure of the 21st century.
Scale of divergenceChina’s push is not just “going green.” It is an industrial strategy: solar, batteries, electric vehicles, grid hardware, and the materials that make them possible.
In 2025, clean technologies were widely credited with driving a striking share of China’s growth, and China continued to account for an outsized portion of new clean power capacity added worldwide.
Its companies also remain dominant in major slices of solar manufacturing and battery supply chains, and Chinese electric vehicles are spreading rapidly across global markets.
The US story is more contradictory. Federal policy has swung toward slower approvals and weaker public support for renewables, while emphasizing abundant domestic oil and gas.
Yet the market signals have not fully followed the politics: private capital and state-level action have helped keep overall clean-energy investment at historically high levels. The result is a split screen — Washington pulling one way, much of the economy pulling another.
China’s clean-energy surge coexists with an inconvenient truth: coal is still central to its power system.
Latest stories
When Trump’s bluff meets reality on Iran
BNP landslide a breakthrough and test for Bangladesh
How will Takaichi navigate between right-wing ideals and reality?
Beijing continues to permit new coal capacity, in part as insurance against blackouts and in part because coal regions and provincial interests remain politically powerful. China is trying to sprint toward an electrified future without letting go of the energy security blanket it knows.
America’s hedging is the mirror image. Even as federal rhetoric tilts toward fossil fuels, many projects financed or launched under prior policy remain in the pipeline, and renewable deployment continues in a range of states for a simple reason: the economics often work.
The US is not “abandoning” clean energy. It is refusing to lead on it consistently — and in industries where learning-by-doing compounds over years, inconsistency can be fatal.
The real contest: industrial architectureStrip away the climate messaging and the contest looks different. This is about who designs, manufactures, and sells the default hardware of modern life: power generation, storage, transmission, EVs, charging networks, and the mineral-processing base beneath them.
China grasped early that the energy transition is an industrial transition. By building scale across the stack, it drove down costs and built a manufacturing ecosystem that competitors struggle to replicate quickly.
That creates a gravitational pull: for many countries, Chinese solar and batteries are not an ideological choice — they are the cheapest way to expand power quickly.
The US has world-class innovation and deep capital markets, but it struggles to turn invention into a durable industrial advantage when policy oscillates. The world may admire American ideas; it will buy whoever can deliver reliable, affordable systems at scale.
China’s advantage brings a new kind of risk. Clean energy is increasingly “connected” — EVs, smart grids, battery systems, and charging networks rely on software, sensors, data flows, and updates.
When hardware and software are fused, supply chains become security chains. Governments worry about data access, hidden vulnerabilities, and the theoretical possibility of remote disruption — a “kill switch” anxiety that will grow as electrification deepens.
These concerns are not one-sided. China itself has restricted where Tesla vehicles can operate in sensitive areas and has imposed data controls, reflecting the same logic: networked machines are infrastructure, and infrastructure is power.
The strategic challenge is that retreat is not a security strategy. If countries respond to dependency risks by failing to build competitive alternatives, they do not reduce vulnerability — they simply guarantee that someone else sets the terms.
What this means for AsiaFor Asia, this divergence is not a binary choice between Beijing’s model and Washington’s model. Many Asian economies sit in the middle of these supply chains — as manufacturers, mineral processors, exporters, and the world’s fastest-growing electricity demand centers.
The practical path is “strategic diversification”: source affordable hardware wherever it is competitive, but insist on verifiable cybersecurity standards, transparent data governance, and procurement rules that prevent single-supplier lock-in.
Sign up for one of our free newsletters
- The Daily Report Start your day right with Asia Times' top stories
- AT Weekly Report A weekly roundup of Asia Times' most-read stories
That means building regional capability where it matters most — grid resilience, storage, standards-setting, and selective industrial depth — while using competition between suppliers to secure better terms.
ASEAN members and major Asian manufacturers can also benefit from supply-chain rebalancing by attracting investment and building trusted capacity — including in critical-mineral processing and battery ecosystems — so dependence becomes distributed rather than concentrated.
The opportunity is to borrow the best of both systems (China’s execution, America’s innovation) without importing the worst (coal entrenchment, policy whiplash).
Neither approach is clean or cost-free. China is gambling that clean-energy dominance will translate into long-term economic and geopolitical leverage — while managing the political and environmental contradictions of continued coal.
The US is gambling that fossil fuel abundance and market dynamism will preserve primacy — even if policy volatility cedes the industrial future to competitors.
History is blunt: the country that builds the infrastructure everyone else depends on tends to shape the rules. Beijing and Washington are both gambling on that truth — in opposite directions.
Y. Tony Yang is an endowed professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Sign up here to comment on Asia Times stories
Sign in with Google Or Sign up Sign in to an existing account
Thank you for registering!
An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.