President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran — and the tumult they’ve inflicted on oil and gas markets — could help America’s arch-adversary, China, strengthen its position as a clean energy powerhouse.
As Chinese officials meet in Beijing this week to identify the country’s top policies for the next five years, China watchers expect the country to continue prioritizing building a new energy system centered on renewables — and events in Iran aren’t expected to change that calculus.
“The country has definitely pulled all these triggers in the last few years to be prepared for a moment like this,” Ashish Sethia, managing director of BloombergNEF, an energy research firm, said in an email.
China has poured huge amounts of money into expanding manufacturing and critical minerals mining to fuel its explosive growth in clean technologies. In the first half of last year, China added more wind and solar facilities than the rest of the world combined, with more than a third of the country’s economic growth in 2025 coming from green technologies like electric vehicles.
Those moves — along with measures to manage oil inventories and increase domestic natural gas production — have reduced China’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, helping to cushion it from the volatility in oil and gas markets stemming from the expanding conflict in the Middle East, according to analysts.
Beijing remains the world’s largest importer of oil and gas, even as it dominates its competitors in the production of electric vehicles and wind and solar power. China got 13 percent of its imported oil from Iran last year. That makes it vulnerable to prolonged supply disruptions, analysts say. It also continues to build coal-fired power plants at a record pace.
The volatility surrounding energy “is going to further underscore for Beijing the need for self-sufficiency,” said Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center.
That means bolstering their commitment to developing solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, said Webster, who also thinks China’s coal use could increase.
Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, expects the conflict to reinforce China’s strategic decision to gradually move away from fossil fuels.
“This event will just accelerate it even further, or certainly cement that strategy,” he said.
Trump, on the other hand, has prioritized oil and gas expansion, worked to dismantle an array of incentives for EVs and solar panels and has repeatedly attacked wind power by ordering offshore projects to halt construction. Surging coal generation in the U.S. last year pushed its climate pollution up, even as China’s greenhouse gas emissions fell.
Trump hasn’t mentioned oil as a motivation for his attacks on Iran, but he is taking action to cool mounting energy prices stemming from the conflict initiated by the U.S. and Israel. The growing war has largely frozen the movement of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, as Iran launched missile and drone attacks across the Middle East and has vowed to attack oil tankers.
Long before the current conflict, China viewed clean energy as a strategic advantage. By contrast, Trump has described it as an initiative by his political opponents.
“If you listen to certain politicians in our country, including the president, they talk about renewables like it’s an environmental and climate change thing,” said Evan Feigenbaum, a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department official who specialized in Asia issues. “The Chinese view it largely as a technology and competitiveness play. It’s not about hugging trees.”
China has long worried about its oil supplies being impacted by disruptions in vulnerable sea channels, such as the Strait of Malacca, a narrow opening between the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia, said Rose Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank.
Its investments in EVs were in part meant to change its economic dependence on oil, she said.
Higher natural gas prices, meanwhile, could create an opening for additional economic and political incentives for renewables and other clean technology, say analysts.
That stands to strengthen China’s standing as the world’s dominant clean tech producer. It could also help developing and emerging economies that can’t afford to import pricier oil and gas.
“What has changed compared to previous oil crises and oil price scares — even the 2021-22 one — is how affordable the clean energy solutions needed to replace oil and gas imports are,” Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X.
Ira Joseph, who tracks gas and power markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said China remains vulnerable to fluctuations in fossil fuels, “but they’re producing most of the world’s potential alternatives to oil and gas that can be used in a lot of the same applications.”
“In the world of electrostates versus petrostates, this is one that shows the advantage of having more exposure to electricity as an energy risk versus oil and gas,” he said.
That doesn’t mean China won’t continue to rely on fossil fuels in its energy mix. It has voiced concern about the Middle East conflict and urged an end to military operations.
“Energy security is of vital importance to the world economy,” a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, Mao Ning, said Tuesday. “Ensuring stable and unfettered energy supply is a responsibility for all. China will do what is necessary to safeguard its energy security.”
China has added roughly 621 million barrels of oil to its stockpile since 2024, far more than the U.S. holds in its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at 415 million barrels, long considered the world’s largest. China’s domestic gas production is at an all-time high, said Sethia of BloombergNEF.
Analysts and China watchers say Beijing is likely to increase oil purchases from Russia in the short term, an outcome of the conflict in Iran that stands to benefit President Vladimir Putin as he continues to wage war in Ukraine.
There’s also a chance that China could use more coal to offset higher gas prices, particularly if supplies from Qatar remain disrupted following an Iranian drone strike on the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility. Qatar supplies about 20 percent of the world’s LNG.
China is building more coal capacity than it is utilizing, in large part because of its strong growth in solar and wind power.
Despite China’s potential to burn more coal, the country could continue its downward trend in power-sector climate pollution due to strong growth in renewables and efforts to diversify gas suppliers, said Sethia.
