How China’s green tech could boost its global finance ambitions

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Nihao from Shenzhen, the one-time fishing village that is now a heaving metropolis of 18mn people and perhaps the most vivid embodiment of China’s astonishing economic transformation over the past four decades.

I’m in China for two weeks to get a closer look at the country’s green energy sector, which dominates much of the market in low-carbon technologies. What happens here will have a crucial bearing on the world’s chances of cutting emissions and bending the curve of global temperature rise.

I’ll have updates from my visits here in the next three newsletters. Today: can China use its green tech leadership to make itself a global financial power, and accelerate the energy transition in the process? Ma Jun, former chief economist at the People’s Bank of China, makes the case.

China’s global green finance opportunity

The time has come, President Xi Jinping wrote earlier this year, for China to build the renminbi into a “powerful currency”, widely used in international trade, investment and reserve holdings.

Beijing’s push to “internationalise” its currency highlights a desire to shed its heavy reliance on the US dollar and challenge Washington’s broader sway over the global financial system. While international usage of the renminbi has been picking up, this drive still has a very long way to go.

The Chinese currency accounted last year for just 2 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves, and about 4 per cent of international settlements, according to a report last month from the European Central Bank.

Does green finance hold the answer?

At least a big part of it, reckons Ma Jun. First as chief economist for China’s central bank, then as head of the Beijing-based Institute of Finance and Sustainability, Ma has been one of the country’s most influential voices on low-carbon finance. The policies that he helped shape have steered domestic capital towards Chinese clean technology companies that now dominate sectors from solar panels to electric car batteries.

Now he thinks Chinese green finance is entering a new phase, as fast-growing developing countries tap China’s financial markets to fund investments in (largely China-made) low-carbon energy kit. “The awareness has just started,” Ma told me. “More countries now know this is an opportunity.”

Enter the panda

Ma pointed to Pakistan’s issuance last month of a maiden Rmb1.75bn ($258mn) “panda bond” — the term for renminbi-denominated instruments issued in mainland China by foreign issuers — with the proceeds reserved for green and social investments. During a visit to Beijing last week, finance minister Dario Durigan announced plans for a first Brazilian panda bond, to raise funds for “strategic investments in sustainable development”.

These issuances are part of a gathering trend. Panda bond issuance reached Rmb136bn in the first five months of 2026, up 90 per cent from a year before. A big part of the explanation lies in a divergence between benchmark interest rates in China, which have fallen in response to slowing domestic growth, and those in the US, kept higher by inflationary pressures. The 10-year US Treasury yield currently stands at about 4.4 per cent, compared with about 1.7 per cent for the Chinese equivalent.

For foreign governments and companies, China’s low interest rate environment should make bond issuance there a “no-brainer”, Ma argued. “There’s cheaper money there, why not?”

Beijing is taking further steps to increase the appeal. Pakistan’s three-year panda bond issuance was almost entirely covered by guarantees from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which has China as its biggest shareholder, and the Asian Development Bank. That enabled it to secure a coupon of just 2.5 per cent, far lower than the 6.975 per cent on a three-year dollar-denominated bond issuance in April.

Meanwhile, Beijing has been consistently promoting the development of China’s market in green bonds (where the proceeds are earmarked for low-carbon investments), even as this market has slowed in Europe and nosedived in the US. Last year China became the biggest market for green bond issuance. The government issued its second green sovereign bond in May.

Special offer

It‘s economically logical for China to help developing nations finance low-carbon investment through green renminbi bonds of their own, Ma noted, as parts of its cleantech sector — notably the solar industry — struggle with a glut of production capacity that has sent prices plunging.

In doing so, he suggested, it can fill a gap left by western financial institutions that have viewed many developing economies as too risky. Even for those nations that do have access to western finance for green investments, Ma argued, there are unique benefits to Chinese finance beyond the upfront cost.

“If you engage with China you get resources not only on finance but also on technology and on corporate ability to run these projects,” Ma said. “Often these are more important things to make a project successful than a couple of percentage points of the financing cost.”

It’s not hard to find grounds for caution. As a correspondent in South Asia, I saw how leaders in Sri Lanka and the Maldives funded lavish investments with Chinese loans that later administrations seriously struggled to service.

And while China is now the biggest sovereign lender to developing nations, its net financial transfers to them have turned negative, according to analysis this year by ONE Data and the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 2020 and 2024, it found, developing nations’ debt service payments to China exceeded the new loans received by $24bn.

But Ma insists that, as a low-income country itself until recent decades, China enjoys a strong level of trust with developing economies. Well before its economic boom started, Beijing was working to build these ties, Ma notes.

He recalls boyhood memories of celebrations for the 1976 completion of the Tazara railway, stretching 1,860 kilometres from central Zambia to the Tanzanian coast — built with the labour of over 50,000 Chinese workers and a huge interest-free loan from Beijing.

“Now I think there’s an even stronger reason, because China produces a large number of affordable technologies,” Ma said. “And so it’s no longer so much driven by geopolitics or friendship. It’s driven by economics.”

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