The comment by President Xi in his UN address, that China would no longer build coal plants abroad came, as a complete surprise. The motives may have been varied: avoiding attacks by the Anglo-Americans on the sincerity of China’s “environmental commitments;” helping to fend off the attacks from the same cast of characters on the Belt and Road as being based on “dirty energy.” In general, China feels that its own stance on environmental issues keeps them in some association broadly with the Europeans, which the Anglo-Americans would like to distance them from. In order to prevent political containment, China hopes to become more prominently involved economically in the world community at large.
But there are also nasty elements within the Chinese bureaucracy (some of whom are not really Chinese at all) who are pushing for a more radical “green” initiative. One of these is Christoph Nedopil Wang, who is the Founding Director of the Green Belt and Road Initiative Center and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF) of the Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) in Beijing, China. Born in Bavaria and educated at the Technical University in Berlin and at Harvard, Wang is the head of an institute that has been pushing for eliminating the coal plants that have been built, or planned, in the BRI — and with considerable success. https://green-bri.org/coal-phase-out-in-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri-an-analysis-of-chinese-backed-coal-power-from-2014-2020/
Between the second half of 2014 and the end of 2020, 52 coal-fired power projects with Chinese financial participation, outside of China, had been announced. Of these announced, only 1 has gone into operation: the 1.3-GW Payra Patuakhali coal power station in Kalapara, Bangladesh, in the first half of 2020. By the same time, 25 of the projects announced since 2014 had been shelved, and 8 ended up cancelled.
