FIIA Spotlight on Energy Transition #3: China’s strategies for the green transition: domestic developments and their foreign policy nexus

Webinar · 05.03.2024 10:00 - 11:15

China is largely seen as a leader in producing resources and technologies for the low carbon transition, for instance the extraction and processing of rare earths and the production of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. It has also played a prominent role in key areas such as the manufacturing of batteries and electric vehicles. While fossil fuels will stay central in the country’s energy mix, the Chinese Communist Party has included the construction of an “ecological civilisation” among its main priorities. Beijing has become a top exporter of green technologies for the West and numerous other foreign states, but Western policies of de-risking could affect existing global supply chains and China’s role in them.

What are the main priorities in China’s policies for the green transition and what are their external implications? How is China’s low-carbon transition governed? What are the consequences of the West’s green sector policies of de-risking for China?

This webinar is the third in a series of ‘FIIA Spotlight on Energy Transition’ events looking at the fundamental transformations taking place in energy systems. The series is part of the FIIA project The Global Politics of the Energy Transition.

Register here to follow the webinar.

Puhujat

Speakers

Yu Hongyuan

Professor and Director of Institute for Comparative Politics and Public Policy Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS)

Yu Hongyuan is a Professor and Director of Institute for Public Policy and Innovation Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. He is also a Honorary Fellow of Center for International Energy Strategy Studies, Renmin University of China, a Visiting Fellow for Sustainable Developmental Research Center of China Academy for Social Science, and a Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He got his PhD degree from Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Mphil degree from Renmin University of China. From 1998 to 2000, he worked with the administrative centre for China’s Agenda 21 at the Ministry of Science and Technology. Yu Hongyuan is an author of numerous publications, including most recently Global Warming and China's Environmental Diplomacy in Nova Science Publishers (2008).

Elina Sinkkonen

Senior Research Fellow, FIIA

Elina Sinkkonen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and holds the Title of Docent in East Asian Studies, specifically East Asian Politics, at the University of Turku. Her research interests include great power relations, authoritarian regimes, regional security in East Asia, Chinese nationalism, public opinion issues in China and domestic-foreign policy nexus in IR theory.

Sinkkonen’s work has been published in Political Psychology, Democratization, The China Quarterly, The Pacific Review, European Review of International Studies and European Foreign Affairs Review, among others. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford at the Department of Politics and International Relations. Her co-edited book on the new roles of women in Chinese society won the 2016 Kanava prize, which is given to the best Finnish book in the fields of politics, society, economics, history or culture.

Chair

Marco Siddi

Leading Researcher, FIIA

Marco Siddi is Leading Researcher at FIIA, where he coordinates the project The Global Politics of the Energy Transition. He is Adjunct Professor in World Politics at the University of Helsinki and in International Relations at Tampere University. He is also a Board Member of the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA), a Steering Committee Member of the ECPR Research Network on Energy Politics, Policy, and Governance, and a member of the European Leadership Network/Younger Generation Leaders Network on Euro-Atlantic Security. He received his PhD at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cologne, in the framework of the Marie Curie Training Network ‘Exact’ concerning the external action of the European Union.