When Donald Trump was sworn in as US president, he quickly signed an executive order triggering the process to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement — the global pact aimed at limiting global warming and slowing climate change.

Since then, the US administration has reversed key domestic and international climate measures, cutting clean energy programs, and scrapping emissions regulations.

Trump's actions mark a clear retreat from the US's previous international climate engagement. The world's largest economy had played a key role in brokering the historic Paris climate deal under Barack Obama, while Joe Biden passed an ambitious legislative package to boost green energy and cut emissions domestically. 

But the US shift away from climate action has opened the door for other countries to fill the void, and attention has increasingly turned to the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter — China. 

China may not seem the obvious candidate to assume the climate leadership mantle. It still builds highly polluting coal-fired power plants to meet growing energy demand for power. But the Asian superpower has also emerged as a clean energy giant.

It is "producing the majority of the clean tech products the world needs to decarbonize," said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the US-based Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI).

"Oversimplifying Beijing as a climate laggard could mean realizing too late that Chinese companies have already far outpaced their Western counterparts in the clean tech sector," he told DW.

China dominates the clean energy market

China now produces more than 85% of the world's solar panels and dominates electric vehicle (EV) and energy storage markets. In 2024 alone, it invested $625 billion (€538 billion) in clean technology — the highest of any nation.

"It realized about 20 years ago that clean technology was strategic and they could use the expertise and industrial prowess they were building up to really go hard on these sectors and get themselves a strategic advantage," said Chris Aylett, a research fellow with the Environment and Society Centre at London-based think tank Chatham House. 

The strategy has paid off. Clean energy industries contributed roughly a quarter of China's GDP growth last year, and that figure could double over the next decade. 

That's partly down to the accelerating global shift toward clean energy fueling demand for technology and equipment, said Muyi Yang, senior energy analyst for Asia at global energy think tank Ember.

"China can actually meet that demand by providing affordable and more innovative technology," he told DW, adding that it not only advances China's own transition but also facilitates change worldwide.

China's influence flowing into the Global South

China's domestic renewables capacity has grown, with wind and solar covering 84% of new electricity demand in 2024 alone. Its impact is particularly visible in Global South countries, whose solar panel imports from China rose 32% in the same year — overtaking shipments to the Global North.

Countries importing clean technology from the world's second-largest economy include major emerging markets like Brazil, Mexico, and Pakistan, with rapid growth also being seen in Southeast Asia and across Africa.

Aylett noted that while these green energy imports help countries meet climate targets, "more practical" considerations are likely driving the trend.

"It's great for energy security," he said, adding that countries are likely thinking, "we don't really want to be importing oil and gas. It's volatile and we don't know where it's coming from and we can't be sure of the suppliers."

Overall, the surge in Chinese renewables technology exports has had measurable effects, helping to reduce global carbon emissions by 1% in 2024.

Overdelivering on 'unambitious' targets

But it's not all positive. Observers have criticized China's emissions reduction targets for being unambitious.

Global emissions hit record highs this year, with extreme weather escalating worldwide. Scientists now warn that by the early 2030s, the world is likely to surpass the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) limit, potentially triggering irreversible climate damage.  

Under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to limiting global temperature rise to well below 2C and to pursue efforts to keep warming under 1.5C. To stay on track, countries are obliged to submit new emissions reduction goals every five years. 

But China's recently submitted targets, promising to cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10% fall well short of what is needed to stop catastrophic levels of global warming. 

However, the country has a history of under-promising and overdelivering on its climate targets. 

The figures might seem unambitious, "if you look beneath it, you can see all these changes which constitute the action needed to get those targets," Aylett told DW.

In 2020, China's President Xi Jinping pledged the country would reach peak emissions by the end of the decade — a goal experts believe it has already achieved, or is close to achieving, five years early. 

That, along with the delivery of its first absolute greenhouse gas emission reduction target, is a good step forward, said Yang.

"These are all positive signs that the transition in the world's largest energy consumer is accelerating and is deepening rather than slowing down, and that's really good news for the rest of the world," he told DW.

Leading in international climate diplomacy 

Still, despite its progress, Beijing has not yet stepped up as a leader in global climate diplomacy. While its deployment of renewables and financing of clean technology abroad "sort of constitute a kind of leadership," Aylett said there is a "reluctance" to officially take up that mantle.

"I don't know if that's a concept that they're especially comfortable with," he added.

Instead, Ember's Yang described China's climate efforts as primarily focused on accelerating its own transition and a "lead by example" approach.

Officially, China has continued to encourage US engagement on climate. At the COP30 climate summit in Belem, the head of the Chinese delegation, Li Gao, expressed hope that the country would return to climate talks.

"Addressing climate change needs every country. We hope that someday, and we also believe that someday in the future, the US will come back," said Gao.

Edited by: Jennifer Collins