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the headline seems so orientalist "the chinese manage to save the world only through their sheer incompetence and lack of discipline"
Also "global onslaught of cheep Chinese green power"
Lmao fuck off.
lmao totally
You'd think that the adoption of renewables would be an inarguably good thing. But somehow this guy turned it into an Asiatic hordes narrative.
"China is hurting our bottom line by...." checks notes... "Combating climate change."
In 2018, the city of Shanghai lured Tesla in to build a gigafactory with what seemed like an especially attractive offer. For years, foreign automakers like Ford, GM, Volkswagen, and Toyota had dominated the Chinese car market—the world’s largest—but were required to form joint ventures with Chinese firms for the privilege of doing business in the country. Shanghai told Tesla it could fully own its Chinese operations. Subsidies for land and cheap loans were proffered as well.
Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory was completed in 168 days. It quickly became Tesla’s largest in the world. And it was fed by a network of local component suppliers that cropped up around it. The only problem—for Tesla, anyway—was that those local firms eventually became the basis for a Chinese supply chain that supercharged the nascent electric vehicle sector in the country. Nearly overnight, firms like Nio and BYD were producing plug-in cars that could rival Tesla in cost and quality. As with solar, a wave of entrants battled for market share, causing profits to evaporate but giving consumers great choices at excellent prices.
The Chinese really mastered the art of using capitalist logic to benefit the ~~people~~ consumers.
Notice how when it's Chinese people doing it, simply offering a good deal is called "luring". Everything has to have a sinister undertone.
Interesting article. Although it seems to me like a lot of the "chaos" described here is a product of using markets to manage distribution and production rather than central planning. Or rather, it only looks like chaos if you look at individual parts of the system in isolation through the lens of market logic, but you miss the overarching planning that is happening on national level in China. A "can't see the forest for the trees" situation. I see a lot of hand-wringing about firms not being able to make enough profits for this or that reason, but perhaps profit is not the priority that is being pursued here? Which is why the article talks of "bizarre dynamics". They are looking at everything through their market lens and it's not making sense, it's "bizarre".
The whole won't somebody think of the profits thing was pretty funny, but pretty good overall.
I especially liked this sentence:
Who benefits, aside from the environment? It’s actually hard to say.
The only beneficiary is the environment? How tragic.
The people enjoying cheap electricity are not benefiting?
Plus, apparently China is also causing chaos in the automobile industry with their out of control EV revolution:
But China’s electrical system hasn’t figured out the rules and pricing to push battery capacity onto the grid fast enough to keep up. And besides, the vast majority of the batteries that China is churning out do not end up in grid storage. They’re revolutionizing another increasingly Chinese-dominated green industry that is going fast, cheap, and out of control: automobiles.
[...] As with solar, a wave of entrants battled for market share, causing profits to evaporate but giving consumers great choices at excellent prices.
RIP those poor innocent profits. They never stood a chance.
Other countries have begun to panic that their own auto sectors could be eviscerated by the competition of cheaper, cleaner vehicles from China.
Panic on the streets of London! Oh the humanity!
Mao Zedong famously declared that a revolution is not a dinner party. It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The green tech revolution—whose violence is principally financial, a withering assault on the value of fossil firms’ assets—is not a dinner party.
I laughed out loud when i read this. No comment. Chef's kiss.
and also later on it just straight up says that everybody benefits
Indeed, the greatest beneficiaries of China’s renewables revolution may, in fact, be consumers, both inside and outside of China.
The whole article basically explains how capitalism is harmful if you read it critically. 🤣
That last quote is just plain awesome, especially considering what sort of site is saying it. This must be one of the best "China is bad"/ cope articles I have read in a while.
whose violence is principally financial
Holy shit they suddenly acknowledged that something like "financial violence" exist, while it was just sparkling freedom, liberty and equality when the spiked fist of market socially murders workers for centuries
It's only economic violence when it hurts the bottom line of corporations.
if nobody can profit from saving the world then nobody will do it!
china casually saving the world simply by not seeking a profit
OMG NOT LIKE THAT
I agree. Overall surprisingly good. Or maybe not so surprising, because most of what i've read so far from Wired's new China issue has been quite decent.
I reckon they must be using AI to do quick searches on marxist literature for choice quotes which honestly I am perfectly fine with. I might start reading Wire again just for this series.
Without reading the article the headline and summary remind me of a sales meeting I was roped into at my previous employer.
The sales manager said sales to Chinese firms were very good in the moment, but that can change at any moment because the government is completely unpredictable. All I could do was laugh internally.
Lol, China literally has the most predictable governance in the world. They are conservative to a fault and publicly announce and write all of their plans down a minimum of five years in advance.
The only way you could be surprised by anything China does is if you are incapable of reading.
Amazing how western "China watchers" are still constantly surprised
Precisely.
This, combined with the absolute imperative to keep the grid balanced, can create negative prices, which have become common in China’s heavily populated Shandong Province.
But instead of just suffering or firing up diesel generators, millions of Pakistanis installed solar panels to free themselves from the grid. The country imported so many Chinese solar panels that the grid as a whole began to fall into what is called a death spiral. Customers started opting out, leaving the grid to charge ever higher prices, which led even more people to flee, and so on.
The duality of globalization.
The Chinese government has tried to get supply under control by pushing the strongest polysilicon firms to form a cartel and squeeze out lesser players who refuse to exit the market. But so far, this seems to be a long shot.
Very wild and fantastical timeline we're in.
Excellent share, thank you! One quote in particular (I have commented elsewhere) was just sublime.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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