Written submission from Dr Sam Geall and Professor David Tyfield (CHI0029)

China's role in the UK net-zero transition: EVs, trust, and new frameworks

Submitted by Sam Geall and David Tyfield

About the authors

Dr Sam Geall is Associate Fellow at Chatham House and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. From 2021-2025 he was CEO at Dialogue Earth. He edited China and the Environment: The Green Revolution (Zed Books, 2013). His focus is on the intersection of climate and geopolitics, with a particular focus on China and the impact of its overseas trade and investments.

Professor David Tyfield is Professor of Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC), Lancaster University. From 2014-2019 he was Executive Director of the Joint Institute for Environment in Guangzhou, a partnership between LEC and Chinese academic partners. His research focuses on sustainable transition, especially urban e-mobility and associated infrastructures, and ‘ecological civilisation’ in China.  His latest book is Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China (Routledge, 2018).

They previously worked together on the ESRC project ‘Low Carbon Innovation in China’ (2012-16) and are currently collaborating in research regarding the impact on global order from the growing dominance of electric vehicles, and associated sectors, by Chinese entities.

Introduction

The UK government policy on China is to “co-operate where we can, compete where we need to, and challenge where we must”. In the category of “co-operate” the paradigmatic example has been climate change and ‘cleantech’ sustainable technologies. In March 2025, Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, flew to Beijing for the first formal UK-China climate talks since 2017, agreeing to “secure and pragmatic cooperation” with China on climate and clean energy.

Yet one year later, the same government blocked Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Ming Yang Smart Energy from building a £1.5bn factory at Ardersier Port in the Scottish Highlands, invoking national security. This serves as one illustration of a broader pattern, discussed in this submission: that the dominant UK policy framing of climate change as a domain for cooperation with China is both descriptively and analytically insufficient.

The electric vehicle (EV) sector also illustrates this well. As the inquiry considers the role of Chinese EVs in Britain, the sector can only be understood as a site of cooperation (around a common interest in decarbonisation), competition (market access challenges, supply chain dependency risks), and challenge (data security and cyber risk).

Therefore, we argue that sustainable technology challenges need to be considered through a more sophisticated approach than the triptych. Asking better and deeper questions about the type of economy Britain wants to build requires both a strategic assessment that is more fine-grained, and a framework better tailored to changing geopolitical realities.

Our submission draws on considerable research and experience around the development of China’s clean technology advantage but does not offer new empirical data. Instead it explores some of the questions that need to be answered in order to establish a better framework for navigating Chinese sustainable technologies in the UK economy.

In our judgement, the question should not be whether to engage with China on the sustainable transition – since that is going to be all-but-inescapable in some fields of technology – but how to adopt a more honest account of the complexity that engagement today involves, and how to produce a clear set of actions that government can take to produce better policy outcomes over the medium term.

Background

To address climate change risks, the world must engage China. The country emits around one-third of the global greenhouse gases that cause climate change and also faces significant climate impacts. A PRC government assessment in 2015 found that the country “faces many risks from climate change including sea level rise, more intense heat waves and more severe and frequent storms, droughts and floods”[1]. China’s vulnerability to sea level rise is especially acute, with more than 650 million people living in China’s coastal provinces. 

China is also the dominant manufacturer of the technologies needed to address climate change. The PRC manufactures 92% of the world's solar PV modules[2]; produces almost 70% of the graphite for batteries; and processes over 90% of the manganese for batteries[3]. Chinese clean technology has been manufactured and deployed at scales that have driven down unit costs substantially. One study found recently that China can already meet the global demand needed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, even without further capacity expansion[4].

China’s support for clean technology innovation is driven and shaped by concerns around energy security, industrial upgrading, and technology leadership. It does not treat climate change and clean technology as separable from geopolitical interests and statecraft, and Britain should not assume it can either. Taking climate seriously as an issue of the national interest means taking it out of the cooperation frame.

Britain must consider dependency risks, and its diversification efforts arguably lag behind its net-zero ambitions. In 2024, the UK imported 68% of its solar panels from China[5]; in 2025, Chinese-built models accounted for about 30% of the more than 470,000 EVs sold in the UK[6]. As for the rare earth elements and magnets essential for wind turbines, batteries, hydrogen storage, and electric vehicles, the UK is entirely dependent on imports and China controls around 70% of rare-earth mining and 90% of processing[7].

The UK is therefore vulnerable to PRC supply weaponisation, and especially so in an age of economic statecraft, where industrial, trade, and technology policy is explicitly wielded to serve national interests. In 2025, China showed it is willing to use these levers in the course of trade disputes, imposing export controls on rare earths, halting production at European carmakers and turbine makers. EVs are an illustrative lens, because they clearly cut across much of what the inquiry is trying to address. They embody:

1             The cost dimension: Chinese EVs are substantially cheaper, in part due to effective PRC industrial policy, and represent a growing share of the UK market.

2             The security dimension: Chinese-manufactured or Chinese-component vehicles  present data risks due to components such as cellular IoT modules. It is highly unlikely that vehicles bound for export from China escape domestic legal mandates for data they collect to be stored on servers in the country.

3             The low-carbon dimension: Blocking Chinese EVs or their components, such as lithium-ion batteries, from the UK market carries real costs for decarbonisation targets. There is no short-term substitute, whether domestically or from dependable allies.

The challenge of juggling these multiple, and often conflicting, imperatives makes it particularly clear that the current framing, with its demand to place whole sectors or technologies into one of three buckets, is not fit for purpose. Furthermore, engaging with Chinese sustainable technologies also requires policymakers to consider the global systemic impact of the UK’s actions.

Trust and distrust

The three-fold categorisation of “co-operate, compete, challenge” can be understood to emerge from two further distinctions (see Figure 1a, below) between sectors and policy areas that are: zero-sum or non-zero-sum, and those that are collaborative or competitive. This yields the three discrete forms of response of current policy, and the possibility of categorising them more specifically as: collaborate (non-zero-sum collaboration), compete (non-zero-sum competition), and challenge (zero-sum competition).

Figure 1: Policy framings regarding Chinese technologies

However, this still largely presumes a stable global order – and specifically a global order that is stable because it has self-stabilising relations of trust: trust in the predictable and non-threatening actions of other powerful agents, and trust in the predictability of the system as a whole. Given the breakdown of trust, this means that not only is “cooperation” a poor fit when it comes to the issue of Chinese sustainable technologies in the UK economy, but also “challenge” is problematic at either end of the strategic spectrum.

To illustrate this: on the one hand, there is a risk that competitive zero-sum issues – such as the  capability of Chinese-manufactured EV components to be remotely accessed during a moment of geopolitical tension — are only tackled where they can be identified in conventional warfare terms. This understates the extent to which Britain is vulnerable, including to supply weaponisation and other economic statecraft that increasingly characterises the world order. On the other hand, to put all national security threats into the same category risks overreaction on the UK’s part – in ways that risk a breakdown into explicitly hostile relations with China.

What is at stake in the inquiry, therefore, is avoiding a UK policy on Chinese technologies that could generate precisely the worst outcomes for national security that it is aiming to avoid – greater disorder at the global system level amid an ongoing and likely epochal transformation. In ongoing research, we argue that a focus specifically on relations of trust and distrust offers a promising approach to consider this changed strategic predicament – and generates at least three key insights. 

First, it suggests a shift in perspective that is responsive to the manifest outbreak of significant, complex and volatile relations of distrust among the most powerful countries in the world. When there are different and contending visions for global order being actively pursued, this recognition foregrounds and enables analysis of how the global system itself is now in play, and poorly crafted action by the UK could precipitate self-defeating outcomes at that level. Overreaction through defensiveness, in other words, could easily backfire in irresponsible ways.

Second, analysis in terms of dynamic, complex and interacting relations of trust and distrust also enables greater sensitivity to risks and dangers, including at global system level, that are otherwise too easily occluded. So while a policy that is too distrusting can actively contribute to an otherwise avoidable breakdown of relations into outright and declared hostility, a policy that is too trusting runs the risk of creating or deepening new weaknesses and vulnerabilities that can be leveraged. 

Third, analysis in terms of trust and distrust can yield insights regarding opportunities that otherwise would go unnoticed. For instance, despite the favoured Chinese framing of “win-win cooperation”, there are constructive steps on the climate agenda that can be taken within the current competition and challenge framings. Accepting and being explicit about grounds of distrust can  open up strategic possibilities for mutually beneficial, if transactional, relations. Security screening for specific components, for example, could be an essential underpinning for cooperation rather than its negation.

Instead of the three-fold categorisation of current policy, focusing on trust suggests a four-fold matrix (Figure 1b, above), which in turn suggests a reshaping of the practical priorities of policy and strategy in this arena (Table 1, below). .

Table 1: Reframing UK policy on Chinese (sustainable) technologies in terms of managing relations of trust/distrust on an ongoing basis

According to the approach set out in Table 1 above, therefore, the goal of policy in this area would be:

1)                 To understand the issues at a sufficiently detailed level to enable the clear placing of issues into one of these ‘traffic light’ categories;

2)                 To work towards moving issues ‘up’ a category where possible;

3)                 In all instances, to establish clear communication and signalling – within and across UK government and stakeholders, and with Chinese counterparts – on the strategic categorisation of any particular issue; and,

4)                 To minimise the number of issues in the Orange category, by making this the key area of ongoing policy review and the prioritised arena for continual close oversight, deploying strategic imagination to redefine and dissect issues so that they can be reclassified into the clearer Yellow or Red categories instead.

To illustrate this, an English city council considering the procurement of a social care fleet of EVs from a Chinese supplier might see a clear cost advantage over the nearest European alternative. The physical hardware in each car, such as the battery pack and chassis, also present no meaningful security exposure. However, the cellular telematics unit that transmits location, driver behaviour, and diagnostic data might connect by default to a server in China, which  under China's Data Security Law is accessible to PRC authorities on request.  

Today, the procurement team will not have clear guidance from central government on whether to proceed. A framework organised around disaggregated risk assessment would help. As an illustrative example, the vehicle hardware would sit in Green: procure. The telematics unit sits in Orange: the council would be required, as a condition of any public procurement, to use a UK-based data management platform with no upstream connectivity to PRC-jurisdiction servers. Without that framework, the council faces an unresolvable dilemma and is forced to compromise on either data security, cost, or decarbonisation.

The analysis above suggests the inquiry should be asking not whether to engage with Chinese sustainable technologies, but on what terms — and with what institutional capacity to make that distinction reliably. A number of remaining questions for government and for future empirical research follow from the framework:

1. Does the UK have the capacity to disaggregate risk at component level? The current policy triptych operates at sector level. The EV case shows that hardware and data connectivity within the same vehicle can sit in different risk categories.

2. Under what conditions can security requirements convert an Orange engagement into a conditional Yellow or Green? Our submission argues that security screening can enable cooperation rather than foreclose it. But it remains to be explored if the technical and legal conditions or enforcement capacity are in place.

3. Which UK dependencies on Chinese sustainable technology supply chains are irreducible within a realistic policy horizon? The carbon cost of restricting Chinese inputs in sectors like EVs, solar, and wind is currently not well understood.

4. How are clear red lines communicated to Chinese counterparts? The trust/distrust framework holds that explicit signals, including statements of what is not negotiable, can stabilise rather than damage working relations. How and to what extent does the UK currently communicate this in sustainable technology sectors (through its formal UK-China climate talks, for example)?

Recommendations

1. Adopt component-level risk assessment as the basis for sustainable technology policy. The government should move away from sector-level categorisations — placing “climate”, “EVs” or “wind” into cooperation or challenge, towards a disaggregated approach that assesses hardware, software, connectivity, data storage and so on separately.

2. Establish a standing review mechanism for technologies that cannot yet be clearly categorised. Since many sustainable technologies will sit in a zone of uncertainty, a standing body with the mandate and expertise to develop conditions under which engagements can be reclassified is a more appropriate response than ad hoc decisions made without precedent or learning.

3. Update the economic security toolkit to address sustainable technology explicitly. The National Security and Investment Act and existing export control frameworks are not designed for assets, such as Ardersier Port discussed above, that are simultaneously climate-critical and security-relevant.

4. Establish clear, public red lines in UK-China sustainable technology engagement. Greater transparency about what the UK will not accept, and why, serves both domestic clarity and external signalling. It is also a precondition for the kind of transactional, conditional cooperation the framework recommends: functional working relations require both parties to know where the limits are.

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