China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/01/1115957/old-new-...
[4] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.
Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.
Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
Housing projects are handled by local governments in China, not the central government. What you're saying is as absurd as saying Detroit going bankrupt is hurting the credibility of Uncle Sam.
> I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown
This and the "OMG demographic collapse" sound like serious copium to me at this point.
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)