China’s Climate Leadership after Hormuz: How Should Europe Adjust?
The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026 offered an unplanned stress test of China’s approach to energy security, and China passed it far better than most expected. The episode demonstrated that the underlying risk of supply disruption is real, while validating a preference for resilience and resource security that has long underpinned Chinese energy and climate policy and has now been reinforced under the banner of building an “energy powerhouse.”
That preference now anchors a three-part bid for climate leadership with Chinese characteristics: exporting China’s own manufacturing overcapacity as the world’s default supplier of affordable clean-energy hardware; expanding global demand for that technology while avoiding binding financial obligations of its own; and offering a rival, security-centred model of the energy transition against the Trump administration’s fossil-fuel-first “energy dominance” agenda.
For Europe, which needs electrification for its own energy security, this poses a difficult balance. China is indispensable to the climate transition, yet dependence on Chinese industry, and on Chinese-supplied digital components within energy systems, raises industrial and infrastructure concerns that shared climate goals cannot dissolve.
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This page contains only a summary of our work. If you would like to have access to all the information from our research on the subject, you can download the full version in PDF format.
China’s Climate Leadership after Hormuz: How Should Europe Adjust?
Center for Asian Studies
Asia is a nerve center for multiple global economic, political and security challenges. The Center for Asian Studies provides documented expertise and a platform for discussion on Asian issues to accompany decision makers and explain and contextualize developments in the region for the sake of a larger public dialogue.
The Center's research is organized along two major axes: relations between Asia's major powers and the rest of the world; and internal economic and social dynamics of Asian countries. The Center's research focuses primarily on China, Japan, India, Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific, but also covers Southeast Asia, the Korean peninsula and the Pacific Islands.
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