What China’s energy sector can and cannot do for the Global South

This story by Qian Sun and Sonia Awale originally appeared on Global Voices on December 10, 2025.

Across the Global South, the energy grid is not just a technical system. It is the fault line where poverty, climate vulnerability, and unequal global power converge. Over 70 percent of the world’s population now lives under the pressure of the “energy trilemma”: securing reliable electricity, ensuring affordable access, and reducing emissions — three goals that rarely align for low- and middle-income countries.

Into this tension steps China. Over the past two decades, China has built the world’s most extensive renewable energy manufacturing supply chain — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, transmission lines, and the industrial capacity to deploy them at speed and scale. This industrial machine now stretches far beyond China’s borders, shaping the energy transitions of countries from East Africa to South Asia.

For many governments facing spiraling fuel costs and limited public finances, China’s energy sector offers something the Global North has repeatedly failed to provide: infrastructure delivered quickly, affordably, and without the political strings often attached to Western lending. But this opportunity comes with its own embedded contradictions — vulnerabilities that become starkly visible in places like Pakistan.

The promise: Lowering the barriers to clean energy

Energy equity remains one of the most persistent injustices in the Global South. Hundreds of millions still lack reliable electricity, and climate disasters routinely destroy fragile grids. China’s export-driven renewable energy ecosystem genuinely lowers the threshold for clean energy adoption. In South Asia, solar and wind deployment became financially feasible largely because Chinese manufacturing pushed global prices down.

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A new Global South Energy Trilemma Index (能源不可能三角), produced by Renmin University of China, underscores this reality. Since 2000, most Global South countries have improved on energy access and security, mainly through economic growth and infrastructure expansion. But environmental sustainability remains low across the region. One of the central findings is simple: without drastic cost reductions in clean technology, most developing countries cannot escape reliance on fossil fuels.

This is the gap China is seeking to fill. Its solar modules, batteries, and power equipment enable countries like Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to pursue renewable energy even amid low fiscal capacity. Climate justice in this case is not abstract here: affordable technology directly shapes whether countries can meet basic needs without deepening carbon dependency.

The contradiction: structural dependence and the “investment deficit”

However, climate justice also requires asking who bears the risks of energy transition — and whether new forms of dependency replace old ones.

Pakistan illustrates this uneasy terrain. Although ranked relatively high on the Energy Trilemma Index — 51st out of 196 countries — its progress is fragile. The country faces a massive “investment deficit”: a structural inability to mobilize the USD 1.01 trillion needed by 2030 for energy transition, compounded by currency instability, circular debt, and volatile foreign investment.

This is precisely where China steps in — and where tensions emerge. Pakistan relies heavily on imported technology because it lacks domestic manufacturing capacity. Chinese-made solar equipment makes clean energy possible, but it also exposes Pakistan to swings in exchange rates, shifting import costs, and long-term technological dependency.

At the same time, legacy coal plants built under earlier phases of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), its international connectivity and development project launched in 2013, continue to burden Pakistan with fixed “capacity payments.” This means Pakistan owes billions annually to independent power producers, many of them Chinese. These contracts shrink the fiscal space available for clean energy investments.

The paradox is painful: China’s cheap solar panels accelerate Pakistan’s transition, yet earlier coal-heavy investments have locked the government into debt cycles that undermine the very shift China now supports.

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The vulnerability: Climate disasters outpacing transition plans

Climate justice in South Asia cannot ignore the region’s physical exposure. Pakistan is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries: scorching heat, recurrent droughts, glacier melt, and catastrophic monsoon floods. In 2022, floodwaters drowned one-third of the country and destroyed power infrastructure nationwide. 

Pakistan’s climate vulnerability is not created by China alone, nor is it confined to any single partner. Much of Pakistan’s energy insecurity comes from its dependence on imported LNG — a system shaped primarily by Gulf and Western suppliers, and by domestic policy choices that locked the country into long-term, dollar-denominated contracts. When Pakistan’s foreign-currency reserves fall, these contracts collapse, shipments are cancelled, and power shortages ripple across the country. This fragility exists regardless of China’s involvement. Yet it inevitably affects the impact of China-Pakistan energy cooperation: even the most ambitious Chinese-backed renewable or transmission projects must operate within an energy system destabilised by volatile global gas markets and by the decisions of multiple external actors. In other words, China is entering an already fractured landscape, one where dependency on imported fuels created jointly by Pakistan, Gulf suppliers, Western companies, and global financial institutions continues to amplify climate risk.

Climate justice demands that energy cooperation not only lower emissions but also strengthen resilience for communities already suffering climate loss and damage.

The opportunity: A different model of engagement

Despite contradictions, China holds a unique potential in the Global South. Unlike Western donors, whose climate financing is fragmented and slow, China can mobilize large-scale infrastructure rapidly. Unlike private capital, it can tolerate longer payback periods. Unlike multilateral institutions, it does not force austerity as a condition for support.

But climate justice requires something beyond speed. It requires strategies that redistribute risks away from the most vulnerable.

To play a genuinely transformative role, China would need to rethink its engagement model. Rather than relying on isolated, project-by-project lending, its cooperation would have to move toward long-term, region-wide planning that strengthens resilience rather than deepening fiscal fragility. Such a shift would require meaningful technology transfer and support for local manufacturing, so that countries are not locked into permanent dependency on imported equipment. It would also mean confronting the burden of debt-heavy legacy contracts, especially those tied to earlier coal investments and now obstructing clean energy uptake. And ultimately, any effective energy partnership must center community-level needs and lived experiences, not only state-level indicators or geopolitical calculations.

China’s growing influence in South Asia is already reshaping geopolitics, but the deeper question is whether this influence will also reshape global climate justice.

Will China support countries like Pakistan in navigating the transition without falling deeper into debt and vulnerability? Will its renewable exports empower communities or lock them into another cycle of dependence? Will South Asia’s energy future be determined by local needs or by the strategic interests of a rising great power?

The answers will depend on how China interprets its dual identity: the world’s largest renewable energy producer and exporter, but also a developing country that claims solidarity with the Global South.

(SY)

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