In the White House, there are no fact-checkers. That is why things were bound to go wrong when Donald Trump took the podium in Davos yesterday.
“China makes almost all the wind turbines in the world, and yet I haven’t been able to find a single wind farm in China,” he said, tossing his head confidently.
“The Chinese are very smart. They make them and sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people who buy them, but they don’t use them themselves … They just put them up to show people what they could look like, but they don’t spin, they don’t do anything.”
What nonsense.
China is not only the world’s largest producer of wind turbines; it is also the world’s largest consumer of wind power. The biggest manufacturer, Goldwind, employs more than 11,000 people in China and abroad. Around 3,000 of them work in research and development. Several other producers are close behind, and competition is fierce.
China’s largest wind farm is located in the northwestern province of Gansu, where wind conditions are favorable and the population sparse. The Jiuquan Power Base, as it is called, is also the largest onshore wind power project in the world. When fully completed, it will have an installed capacity of 20 GW. By comparison, our 65 wind farms together have an installed capacity of 5.1 GW.
Today, China has a vast number of wind power installations, particularly in the north and northwest—and offshore. Total installed capacity is estimated at around 580 GW, making China by far the world’s leading wind power nation. But Donald Trump has no fact-checkers. Instead, he produces his fantasies unchecked and unchallenged.
For many years, China has invested heavily in alternative energy such as wind and solar power. Perhaps the most important driving force has been the need for energy security. China has long been a major importer of oil and gas, and increasingly of high-quality coal. Wind power is considered a secure energy source, since the wind blows regardless of trade wars, blockades, or sanctions.
Wind power alone does not solve everything, but it is a visible and marketable alternative to coal—especially in northern China, which has traditionally suffered from massive coal pollution. Government policy aims to establish new wind farms in sparsely populated areas, of which China has many. Tibet and the western region of Xinjiang are therefore well suited, as are Gansu and Inner Mongolia.
Recent estimates suggest that wind and solar together account for around 25 percent of China’s total electricity generation. Wind alone contributes 11–13 percent, solar 10–12 percent. The government’s clear goal is for these shares to grow—and quickly. Wind power alone could reach 30 percent of total electricity generation by 2040.
All this is happening while Trump prioritizes oil, gas, and coal at the expense of renewable energy sources. He has also withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement and the UN climate convention, arguing that global environmental cooperation is not in America’s interest. Through initiatives such as the “One Big Beautiful Act,” he has taken steps that gradually remove incentives for wind and solar power.
His stated goal is not to build a single wind turbine in the United States unless there are strong legal requirements forcing him to do so. Even so, it now appears that Denmark’s Ørsted and Norway’s Equinor will be allowed to complete their ongoing offshore wind projects.
For Chinese producers of green technology, Trump’s folly is manna from heaven. It allows them to avoid competing with the United States in a rapidly growing market. In 2024, China exported renewable-energy technology worth approximately $177 billion. That figure accounted for about five percent of China’s total merchandise exports that year, and it is set to rise sharply in the years ahead.
China’s advantage in this race is that it has developed an enormous manufacturing apparatus capable of delivering cheaply and quickly. Demand is particularly strong in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Europe, by contrast, Chinese companies face growing resistance, partly due to the EU’s desire to protect its own industries. According to the industry association WindEurope, Chinese wind power accounts for just over one percent of installed capacity.
The United States and China once had substantial bilateral cooperation on climate issues, which helped pave the way for the Paris Agreement in 2015. When Trump took the helm in the White House in 2017, much of that cooperation crumbled, and today little remains. American representatives no longer attend international meetings where climate is on the agenda, and even much of the bilateral research collaboration has been frozen.
“When the two most important countries in the world behave this way, the whole world loses,” said John Kerry, the former U.S. special climate envoy, recently.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has on several occasions tried to persuade the United States to accept even limited cooperation, but even that has proven impossible. As a result, no American delegates will attend the next major UN climate summit, to be held in Antalya, Turkey, in November. Under Trump, the United States has no central climate coordinator, nor does it have a climate ministry.
In April, Trump will travel to China on an official visit. Such trips are usually rushed and offer little opportunity to see how ordinary Chinese people live. This time, the Chinese hosts should offer him a visit to the giant project in Gansu. Construction began in 2009. Fourteen months later, 3,500 turbines were already installed. Today, there are said to be twice as many—and, contrary to Trump’s claim, they most certainly “spin,” relentlessly.
Marco Polo passed through this region on his journey to China nearly 800 years ago. In the book he left behind, he describes the constant windstorms that tested both people and animals. When he finally reached the inhabited regions farther east, he observed that the Chinese burned coal everywhere. “In China,” he wrote, “I saw some small black stones, and the Chinese use them to heat their houses.”
In the years to come, wind turbines will increasingly take over that job.
