The China Pivot: What will Beijing’s climate leadership look like?

World leaders are flocking to Beijing. In the first weeks of 2026, Canada’s Mark Carney, the UK’s Sir Keir Starmer and South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung have all made high-profile visits - an unmistakable signal of global power recalibrating.

China’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing is already well established: from solar panels and batteries to wind turbines. The question now is whether this transition remains merely made in China, or whether it is increasingly being shaped and led from Beijing.

Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson consider what this shift may mean for the future of climate leadership - and for the institutions, alliances and norms that have shaped global climate cooperation for decades. They’re joined by scholar of China’s political economy and climate governance Yixian Sun, who has recently advised the UK government on their engagement with China. He unpacks the country’s own vision of leadership, its evolving role in the Global South, and the risks and opportunities of an increasingly multipolar climate order.

As the world recalibrates around China’s growing role, how does Beijing see itself? And what are other governments actually seeking as they turn towards it? We spoke to the man advising the UK government ahead of Keir Starmer’s arrival in Beijing.

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

Join the conversation:

Instagram @outrageoptimism

LinkedIn @outrageoptimism

Or get in touch with us via this form.

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan

Assistant Producer: Caillin McDaid

Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(415)

What World Will They Inherit? Live from Bath Abbey

Before she was Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris agreement, who was she? What did believe in 2015 that she no longer believes?In June, an event about the next generation of climate leaders w...

15 Okt 42min

How Can a Country Survive Losing Its Land?

A ship rams a canoe. The canoe starts to sink. The ship's crew lean over the rail and offer a loan to repair it.That is how Surangel Whipps Jr., President of Palau, describes climate finance in the Pa...

8 Okt 40min

The Easy Wins Are Gone. What's Actually Next for Net Zero?

Net Zero was once a radical idea. Now it’s both an accepted global target, and an increasingly toxic political faultline.This week, Tom is back from the UN General Assembly and New York Climate week, ...

1 Okt 40min

Who Runs the World?: Inside the UN’s Secret Leadership Race

The news cameras may be following rising tensions between President Trump and President Pezeshkian of Iran, but deep in the bowels of the United Nations, fifteen countries are about to choose, in priv...

24 Sep 58min

Inside the New Security Thinking: The Weaponisation of Disaster?

This summer, extreme heat killed tens of thousands of people across Europe. The number killed by terrorism was, as our guest puts it, very very small. So why are the institutions built to keep people ...

17 Sep 44min

Blocker or Blueprint? India on the World Stage

At COP26 in Glasgow, India famously asked to change one word in the final text. ‘Phase out’ became ‘phase down’. The COP President fought back tears, as country after country branded this a moment of ...

10 Sep 40min

What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth

"This will never work in India."That's what Indian truck manufacturers said about electric freight. Now they build the trucks.Something is going on here at a speed the rest of the world has not yet no...

3 Sep 32min

India: Life Inside Delhi's 'Airpocalypse'

In Delhi, lung cancer is no longer a smoker’s disease. It’s a breather’s disease.But the most polluted capital on earth sits in a country running five years ahead of its Paris clean power target. In t...

27 Aug 38min