SCIO briefing on China's Policies and Actions on Climate Change

China Report:

I have two questions. First, China has proposed the "Belt and Road Initiative," and I want to ask whether China intends to cooperate with countries along the "Belt and Road," especially those on the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road, to tackle climate change. Will we provide financial assistance to the construction of coastal defenses among other infrastructure projects?

Second, amid China's call to vigorously develop clean energy, recent years have seen some PV manufacturers such as Suntech Power face difficulties. How do you suggest we avoid overcapacity in the clean energy sector due to excessively rapid development?

Xie Zhenhua:

Cooperation in regard to the "Belt and Road" will be increasingly connected with responses to climate change. For example, in our overseas aid or cooperation, such as the infrastructure development, we should fully consider making it low-carbon. In so doing, we are perfecting their infrastructure while meeting their low-carbon targets. We will pay more attention to this in the future.

Seeing that China is developing green finance, other countries all seek to stress green, low-carbon requirements in their cooperation, especially economic cooperation, with China. This trend will gradually become more prominent. In our cooperation with other developing countries, we should consider improving their adaptability to climate change; this is our primary concern in future South-South cooperation. We should help other developing countries to raise their abilities in early warning and forecasting, risk reduction and prevention, infrastructure construction, and how to actively respond to climate change, particularly extreme climatic conditions.

It is certainly an important sector we should consider, and one that will combine the shaping of the "Belt and Road" and the improvement of other developing countries' response to climate change.

As to the development of the PV industry in China, this sector of renewable energy is developing rather fast with technology upgrading. We have a large PV sector. It is fair to say that PV products made in China occupy quite a large share in the global market. As one of the major contributions, China has greatly lowered the costs of the PV industry as well as that of renewable energy as a whole. In their development, some enterprises may have expanded recklessly. But perfecting market standards and helping enterprises become more mature will solve such issues eventually.

In my negotiations with the United States and the European Union, I noted that although everyone encourages the development of renewable energy sources, they launch anti-monopoly probes against the Chinese PV industry. Whether they admit it or not, the Chinese PV industry has made huge contributions to these countries and to the entire world in that we lowered the cost and raised the technology. They had to admit this fact.

Hu Kaihong:

This is the end of the press conference. Thank you, Mr. Xie, and thank you all.