An article was published in the Financial Times yesterday (13th January 2026) entitled ‘How the west fell behind in the green tech race’. It describes how China “has become the global powerhouse in renewable energy technologies, supplying more than 90 per cent of the world’s solar panels and dominating battery supply chains, as well as the processing of rare earth materials that are critical to the industry.” It also describes how relevant research, technical knowhow and equipment first spread from western countries to China during the 1980s to the 2000s.
While the article describes the problem well, it is not as effective in explaining how China managed to achieve its current lead in green technology. The article quotes Geoffrey Pyatt, a former US assistant secretary of energy who says “We all were asleep at the switch as the Chinese government decided to prioritise these clean energy technologies as a matter of national industrial strategy.” Rasmus Lema, an expert on green technology at the University of Johannesburg is quoted as saying: “There were different technology transfer channels and mechanisms, but the common thread was the learning-centred approach by the Chinese government and companies. From the beginning, they had a strategic vision of becoming leaders in these technologies.”
The article does not consider at all what I consider to be major reasons why we in the west ‘have been asleep at the switch’ and did not realise until too late that the Chinese government and companies ‘had a strategic vision of becoming leaders in these technologies’.
In my view one reason for our failure is the enduring view that China ‘could not innovate’. People in the west continued for too long to see China as a type of former colony that lacked the necessary institutions to develop its economy, and were firmly convinced that our science and technology could never be equalled by a ‘communist’ or ‘authoritarian’ state. Another reason is the serious lack of Chinese language understanding in the west, or indeed interest in keeping up with news of Chinese industrial developments. Our press has been far more active in reporting on perceived abuses of various kinds in China and failed to focus on the enormous industrial transformation that was underway. How many academics and journalists in western countries (including the so called ‘China experts’) actually keep up with Chinese publications (a large proportion of which are not translated into English)? I suspect there are very few who do. I subscribe for example to Sanlian Life Weekly (三联生活周刊). This is a major Chinese publication with a weekly circulation of 800,000, which frequently publishes articles on science and technology issues, but there is no English edition of it. I do not know how many subscribers there are outside China, but it must be a very small number. There are of course many technical and scientific journals published in China, and I suspect the same problem exists with those as well.
These multiple failings are still apparent now in report after report about the ‘flagging’ Chinese economy, at a time when its GDP growth (albeit lower than in the past) still far exceeds growth rates in Europe and the US. We have not just ‘been asleep at the switch’, we have also been extremely complacent in our ingrained feelings of superiority and have failed to take the necessary steps to inform ourselves of what has been going on in China.
Michael Ingle (michaelingle01@gmail.com)
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