China didn't create the push to net zero, what it did do though is the earliest, biggest bet on the hardware net zero runs on, and that bet has paid off faster than most governments planned for.
Start with the numbers. China controls roughly 60% of all solar, wind and battery equipment manufacturing capacity, and over 80% of global solar module output. It controls over 40 to 50% of global rare earth reserves and almost 70% of rare earth production and refinement, the materials behind EV motors, wind turbines and grid scale batteries. None of that comes down to geology alone. China's dominance of these supply chains stems not from holding the largest resource base for primary supplies, but from decades of investment in the technology and capacity to process and refine them, while processing capacity elsewhere was lost during market downturns.
The winners are specific companies, not an abstraction. A Chinese company, BYD, has become the world's biggest EV manufacturer, and the scale of China's clean tech manufacturing has driven solar module prices down by around 80% over the past decade. Every subsidy a Western government hands out for solar, wind or EVs ends up, one supply chain step removed, helping pay for that scale.
That capability is leverage as well as profit. Expanded export controls introduced through 2025 on rare earths, magnets, battery materials and solar grade polysilicon mean exporters now need government permits to transfer the equipment and know how behind them, giving Beijing the ability to slow the exact components the rest of the world depends on. Western governments are trying to claw back ground through subsidies and mineral deals, but building an independent rare earth supply chain outside China could take fifteen years and cost a great deal, according to researchers who study critical minerals and geopolitics. Until then, China effectively sets the pace of a transition everyone else is trying to run on its own terms.
My take: the useful question for investors isn't whether net zero happens. It's who gets paid while it does, and right now that's overwhelmingly Beijing, both the state and the handful of companies it backed long before the rest of the world took the transition seriously.
"The 20th century was the oil boom. We're in the rare earths boom now, and this boom is going to fund everything for the next 30 to 50 years."— Tony Sage, CEO of Critical Metals, November 2025
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