Can Greens Lead the Way on China?

Multiple global supply shocks have made the strongest case yet for reducing dependencies by phasing out fossil fuels. But on clean energy too, Europe has grown dependent on China, the uncontested global leader. As trade tensions with Beijing intensify, Greens in particular face a difficult balancing act: How to boost the green transition without repeating past mistakes? And can they reconcile realpolitik with human rights?

When the European Union committed to cutting emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, it opened up an uncomfortable question: could it hit those targets without leaning too heavily on China, its trading partner with whom relations are increasingly tense, but who now stands as the undisputed global leader in global green tech?

Today China makes up more than 80 per cent of global solar panel manufacturing capacity, but it has also established control over the supply of materials for panels: Beijing holds 70 per cent of the global supply of graphite and rare earth elements, as well as a near-monopoly on the processing of critical minerals. By contrast, the EU is almost entirely reliant on imports for critical materials.

However, recent events, such as the intensification by Beijing last year of restrictions on rare earth exports as part of a trade war initiated by the US, exposed the risks borne by an over-reliance on China in these sectors. And despite being the global leader in renewable energies, China remains the world’s largest polluter, responsible for 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Europe is now walking a thin line between trying to reduce its dependence on China in sensitive sectors while striving to meet its climate and energy transition targets. This challenge cuts across the political spectrum, but it poses a particular test for European Greens, given their commitment to ambitious climate policies and an efficient green transition. So how do Greens approach China? How do they perceive Beijing’s role when it comes to Europe’s green transition? And are they even aligned?

Common threads

Green foreign policy remains a spectrum of ideas rather than a clearly defined approach to the world’s varied issues. When the Heinrich-Böll Foundation attempted to map the foreign policies of green parties worldwide in 2022, it found common threads. Parties displayed a strong commitment to a values-based foreign policy with elements of interventionism, and emphasised the promotion of democracy, human rights, and feminism. Yet behind these lay differences on peace and security that reflect regional histories and sensibilities.

Although Greens found common ground with the left on Palestine, they often diverge on China.

Much like wider foreign policy, Green party approaches to China share broad characteristics that impact how they mobilise on human rights violations there.

“Human rights have always been a pillar [of Green foreign policy],” says Reinhard Bütikofer, a retired German Green politician who was a leading voice on China in the European Parliament (EP) between 2009 and 2024. “I recall that many Greens were appalled by the Tiananmen massacre. And the German Greens took an active role after that in upholding the arms embargo [to China]. When our coalition partner SPD [Social Democrat Party of Germany] in Berlin proposed that we should lift the arms embargo, we blocked it.”

Over the last decade, Greens have denounced the internment of ethnic minority Uyghur in political “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, and in 2019 pushed for the first resolution in the EP condemning it. The German Greens’ mobilisation on this issue resulted in their denial of entry to China.

Besides human rights, the fast adoption of renewable energy resources is a key concern. As Green MEPs fight to prevent the watering down of the Green Deal, its implementation comes with a problem: overreliance on China. Chinese imports to support Europe’s green transition have emerged as a hot potato for European Green parties.

Buy European?

Solar panels are a particular sore point. In 2023, Beijing controlled 98 per cent of global production of solar wafers – the semiconductor material critical to photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. This quasi-monopoly places a stranglehold on the rest of the global solar supply chain. Although approaches vary slightly on how Europe should shun China’s affordable solar panels while keeping the green transition going, Greens are generally wary of a new dependency on China.

“The current position of the Greens/EFA Group is that limiting purchases from China and buying more expensive European green technologies is an investment into the future,” said Markéta Gregorová, a Czech MEP elected with the Pirates who sits in the Greens/EFA Group and serves as co-chair of the EU delegation to the People’s Republic of China.

Beyond the economic logic, Chinese-made solar panel inverters – the devices that convert the current generated by solar panels to usable electricity – represent a documented cyber threat, which some Greens are particularly aware of. “As a negotiator for the revision of the EU Cybersecurity Act, I wake up at night thinking about the inverters in solar panels from China,” adds Gregorová. The worry is that through rogue communication devices recently found in Chinese-made solar inverters, Beijing could remotely access (and switch off) the solar grid. Exploiting this could destabilise national power grids. Indeed, Beijing’s hold on the kill switch was already flagged last year by intelligence agencies as dangerous.

On national stages, the issue is linked to political debates about energy sovereignty that have been reignited by external shocks. The risks of depending on Russian fossil fuels became apparent during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more recently the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is exposing more vulnerabilities in our energy supply. Samuel Cogolati, the former co-president of Ecolo, the francophone Green party in Belgium, calls for an energy transition “coherent” with the lessons from these external shocks.

“We have to hold the same line when we speak about China – I don’t think it would be in the interest of the Europeans to let supply chains concentrate in China. A very pragmatic discourse and a strategic vision [for how to restart industry] in Europe must belong to the ecologists, if we want to stay credible.”

Building consensus

In the European Parliament, trade tensions between Beijing and Brussels have stolen the limelight from issues such as human rights and the green transition. Gregorová admits that the Greens “need to speak realpolitik too, because if we [the EU] are weakened by the trade war, we can’t help anyone else.”

Yet the Greens/EFA continue to hold on to their founding commitments. “I think that we are still probably the most credible voice with regards to human rights,” said Chiara Miglioli, policy advisor to the Greens/EFA on international trade and China since 2012. When she accompanied the EP’s China delegation to Beijing in May, “everybody had the expectation that [the Greens] would raise the human rights issue. And indeed we did.”

But when it comes to playing a leadership role on China policy, it seems the Greens’ heyday is over. Past policy is embodied in the figure of Bütikofer, who in 2021 led the Greens in requesting and negotiating the EP vote to freeze the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), a deal that supporters hoped would further open China’s internal market to EU companies. Discussions on the CAI were promptly halted in March 2021 after Beijing sanctioned five MEPs in retaliation for European sanctions against four Chinese officials believed to be linked to human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Bütikofer, the former chair of the EP’s Delegation for Relations with the People’s Republic of China (D-CN), is largely thought of as the founder of the European Greens’ China policy. “Still nowadays, many of our current positions on China have been very much shaped by him,” adds Miglioli, who advised Bütikofer on several China-related legislation and resolutions

Part of his legacy was to make Greens think of themselves as consensus builders. Bütikofer explains that building a wide majority consensus on China in the EP was his main goal. “My understanding has been that foreign policy is a realm that the member states jealously protect against European institutions. So the European Parliament could only play a role if it would stand together.”

In line with that way of thinking, today the Greens support the hard line of the Commission on China, and, says Gregorová, “are glad [it] has finally awoken to the security issues which Greens have been pointing out for a long time.” The European Parliament is now quite consensual when it votes on China, so the Greens’ role is not about forming winning majorities. “We raise the ambition of any compromise,” says Miglioli. “We have always been the ones pushing for the most ambitious option, to make sure that there are no loopholes. I believe we have succeeded.”

But a unified European China policy is still lacking. This year, the European Parliament has organised official visits to China. For Gregorová, “[they] have started going to China as kittens that have just fallen out of the basket. It has been very uncoordinated. We need to project more unity as China takes notice.”

However, merely focusing on building consensus might hinder the development of a stronger Green political line on China. Other parties have been less shy on that front. For instance, the current chair of the D-CN, German Renew Europe MEP Engin Eroglu, promotes the EU’s deregulation agenda and advocates for further deregulation measures to make European companies more competitive as a way to reduce imbalances with China. Facing such arguments, the Greens could take a clearer and stronger opposing stance, according to Miglioli. The policy advisor argues that “[Eroglu’s] focus on deregulation is a simplification and the wrong recipe because it is impossible to compete with China on production costs.”

She sees an opportunity for Greens to strengthen their voice. “Greens as a whole are not prioritising China enough as an economic issue. An anti-capitalist angle, critical of multinationals, corporate power, and vocal on labour rights and labour standards, could be an interesting idea to pursue.” She adds that “big multinationals have benefited from access to the huge Chinese market and they have really pursued profit maximisation by delocalising production to China. And now we have these huge dependencies.”

Principles versus pragmatism

However, the dependencies described by Miglioli also make it harder for Greens to build coalitions to support their policies. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, where Greens went from opposition to government in 2021.

Bündnis 90/Die Grünen’s Annalena Baerbock served as foreign minister until 2025. Critical of the German foreign policy consensus, Baerbock called Xi Jinping a dictator, openly criticised China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea for having no legal basis, and condemned its cooperation with Russia. In an attempt to break away from Merkel’s “quiet diplomacy”, Die Grünen tried to bring a new China strategy, defining China as “partner, competitor, and rival” while emphasising the “systemic rivalry” aspect. This sat uncomfortably with their senior coalition partner, the Social Democrats, who have traditionally been more appeasing towards both China and Russia in the name of economic pragmatism. It also upset German industry, which had grown increasingly reliant on China for exports.

These constraints pushed the Greens to evolve and water down some of their initial policy ambitions in an effort to win over Germany’s powerful industrial sector. Back in 2021, a German automotive start-up CEO described this change to the Financial Times as “a transition from a hardline environmental party to ‘a party of the bourgeoisie’.” Still, in 2024, the German Greens favoured the adoption of EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

Now back in the opposition, Die Grünen continues to actively bring attention to China-related issues in the Bundestag. Based on Bundestag records, the party has been among the most vocal in presenting China-sceptic questions to the government this year. The Greens have scrutinised Chinese investment in Germany’s critical infrastructure and European car manufacturing, imports of Russian and Belarusian wood through China, and cybersecurity.

Left and right approaches

Greens can serve as an alternative leftist voice on China, pointing out the incoherences of leftist figures who uncritically marry anti-imperialism with a pro-Beijing stance.

“We were not trying to have a left approach to China; we wanted to have the correct approach to China”, said Bütikofer when asked if he perceived the Green position as part of a wider left-wing approach to China policy. Being Green doesn’t mean going left in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe. The German Greens are closer to the liberal centre, and the Austrian Greens even formed a coalition government with the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) in 2020.

Meanwhile, western and southern European Green parties tend to lean more towards the left. When it comes to their foreign policy, this translates into different levels of alignment with left-wing parties, whose foreign policy is often defined by a commitment to anti-imperialism and defiance of US hegemony. And although Greens found common ground with the left on Palestine, they often diverge on China.

This is particularly striking in France, where Les Écologistes prove that a Green party can be both anchored in the Left and maintain a coherent critical stance on China. Under the leadership of Marine Tondelier, the party established a clear distinction between their position and that of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI).

Following LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s call for the development of “privileged relations” between Paris and Beijing, and his downplaying of human rights violations and Beijing’s threats against Taiwan, Tondelier signed a steadfast response on her blog titled “Moving beyond the fascination for China.”

“When will we learn, us the people of the left, that anti-imperialist criticism cannot compromise itself by promoting autocracies?” asks Tondelier. “How can the Left be persuasive beyond our activist circles if we are incapable of maintaining a minimum level of consistency regarding our values?”

The post sketches out a progressive approach to China, re-affirming strong positions on human rights and democratic values, and defending a pragmatic and united policy of European engagement with Beijing. This involves cooperating with China on “segments of mutual interest”, including on the energy transition, and rejecting a simple alignment with “Washington’s crusade” against Beijing. However, the French MP is clear that the “industrialisation and electrification of Europe should be driven by European companies”, and that Chinese investment should be “limited, controlled, and contingent upon sustainable concessions” on technology transfers. Breaking with an economically liberal approach, Tondelier urges investments and planning to support a green transition.

The French case shows that Greens can serve as an alternative leftist voice on China, pointing out the incoherences of leftist figures who uncritically marry anti-imperialism with a pro-Beijing stance.

Security policy: Where Greens diverge

Security and defence remain a point of serious divergence between European Green parties. The parties, members, and voters are torn between radical pacifism and realpolitik. This translates into differences in China policy.

It seems that Green parties closer to both the geographical and political centre of Europe tend to have a more realist approach to the issue, putting emphasis on security. For the Central and Eastern European parties, this probably relates to their closer historical experience with Russia and ongoing security threats from Moscow.

In recent years, China’s impact on European security has become more palpable. Beijing maintains an official neutrality on the war in Ukraine, yet has increased its support for Russia’s war effort despite Western sanctions. Beijing continues to provide large volumes of dual-use technologies (goods, software or materials that have both civilian and military applications) vital to Russia’s military-industrial base. Further instances of transnational repression and spying operations have made Beijing a tangible security concern.

Green parties do notice and respond. The Czech Green MP Gabriela Svárovská asserts that a combined focus on “human rights, values, security, and competitiveness” is what distinguishes her party’s China policy. The Finnish ​​Vihreät’s 2025 Foreign and Security Policy Program mentions China eight times, noting its interests in the Arctic, its growing influence in Central Asia, and its threats to Taiwan.

Governing or opposing

Yet many European Green Parties still don’t have a clear China policy.

The British Greens, who made historic electoral gains under the leadership of Zack Polanski, have so far given little thought to their China approach beyond human rights concerns. Their 2024 foreign policy paper made no mention of China. Yet Chinese state threat activities on UK soil – including recognised risks of espionage, spying, and shadow policing operations, as well as cyber attacks – increasingly came under the public eye during former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration. As the latter also attempted to reset diplomatic relations with the PRC, this seems like a missed opportunity for the Greens.

A similar thing can be said of the Danish Socialistisk Folkeparti (Green Left1), who have been part of the government coalition since June 2026. While they criticised the former government’s involvement with China in 2021 and later voiced criticism of China’s support for Russia, in recent years they have gone relatively silent. Denmark is seen as one of the more China-friendly countries in the EU and signed a strategic climate partnership with Beijing in 2023. We have yet to see how the Greens will deal with dependencies on China once they are in the governing seat. (We approached both Danish and UK Greens to elaborate on their positions on China, but did not receive a response.)

By contrast, the Hungarian Green Party LMP used to be quite vocal about the country’s ties with China, as Viktor Orbán made Budapest Beijing’s closest EU ally, as well as the Union’s top recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment. Home to numerous projects linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including in critical infrastructure, Orbán’s Hungary openly opposed the European “derisking strategy” aimed at reducing critical vulnerabilities and dependencies. Not only did the former prime minister dismiss EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports as an “economic cold war”, he also undermined them by welcoming Chinese industrial giants to establish EV battery factories in the country.

Before it was dissolved following its failure to meet the electoral threshold in the 2024 local elections, LMP accused Orbán’s Fidesz government of “offering Hungary on a platter to Chinese investors”, compromising “the country’s natural assets, environmental treasures, and dwindling human resources”, and voiced concern about CEE becoming “an industrial backyard and dumping ground for Western countries and China”.

Opposing the government’s China policy has been crucial to the Serbian Green-left Front (Zeleno-levi Front), born from grassroots anti-corruption protests and established in its current form during the 2023 protests in Serbia. “As an opposition party, we are not trying to criticise China as much as we are trying to criticise our regime’s ties to China,” says the party’s international secretary Marko Vujačić.

In the Serbian context, Green China criticism stems not from trade imbalances, but mainly from the negative environmental impact of Chinese investment in copper and gold mining and the exploitative working conditions of workers in Chinese factories.

“Although the party does not have a clear constructive China policy, it exercises a clear line of caution towards China,” adds Vujačić, while confirming that the party has also avoided alliance with, or admiration for, the Chinese Communist Party, which is often the case with Serbian left-wing movements. “While Green parties in Serbia have historically been co-opted by the regime, the Zeleno-levi front is an exception,” said Petr Čermák, an analyst at the Association for International Affairs.

A new approach

The former dominant approach to China in Europe, led by global free trade devotees, has been “naive, depoliticised and solely centred around profit,” Tondelier wrote in her blog. As China’s activities and influence in Europe raise more political, social, environmental and security concerns, a new approach is emerging, and Green parties could seize the momentum to voice a bolder political position rooted in Green principles.