Critical convergence

China and the US share significant common ground in advancing green, low-carbon development and tackling global climate challenges

A stable relationship between China and the United States is an important global public good, which not only affects the pattern and development of global governance, but also influences all aspects of the international community’s energy transition and climate action. After their meeting in May, the heads of state of the two countries agreed to build a constructive relationship of strategic stability as a new framework for China-US ties. This provides a more mature and resilient model for major-country coexistence that has been developed from the intense and turbulent bilateral relations of the past few years. In this process, the difficulties in China-US cooperation on climate and energy issues are expected to be further alleviated.

In fact, what China and the US are currently experiencing is not a simple “warming relationship”, but a deep reconstruction of institutionalization. As the two countries demonstrate the responsibility of striving to put their previously highly uncertain major-country relations into normalized communication channels, it is necessary to review the systems that endure in bilateral relations.

The China-US Working Group on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s is one of the few China-US climate cooperation platforms to maintain regular intergovernmental dialogue. Thanks to the Chinese government’s consistently responsible climate policies and stance, as well as the active participation of knowledgeable people in the US (local governments such as California have shown high enthusiasm for cooperation in this field), bilateral cooperation in the fields of energy and climate has endured.

Taking climate cooperation as an opportunity, China and the US can make achievements in the field of methane emissions reduction. As an important greenhouse gas, methane needs to be taken seriously as it has a global warming potential that is tens of times more than that of carbon dioxide. Over the past year, China has issued a series of major documents aimed at supporting methane management. For the first time, China’s new round of nationally determined contribution targets has included non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases such as methane, and the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) lists the reduction of non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases as a major project, demonstrating the country’s firm determination to advance methane control at the national level. According to the “Sunnylands Statement on Enhancing Cooperation to Address the Climate Crisis” issued at the 2023 San Francisco Summit between the heads of state of China and the US, the reduction of non-carbon dioxide GHGs such as methane has been identified as a key area of cooperation, and a dedicated working group has been established accordingly. The group is directly led by high-level officials from both sides. Since 2024, the two sides have held multiple dialogues, providing a stable and professional communication platform for methane emissions reduction cooperation between China and the US. Among them, not only top universities such as Tsinghua University and Harvard University are still cooperating on projects such as “China-US Deep Decarbonization Technology Innovation and Policy”, but also regions in the US such as California have signed local climate action memorandums with provinces in China such as Guangdong and Hainan, listing methane reduction as the direction of cooperation. This has become a substantive and institutionalized highlight of current climate cooperation between the two countries.

The prospects for cooperation between China and the US in the field of nuclear energy are also broad. China is the world’s largest market for nuclear power plants, with plans to build dozens of new nuclear power plants by 2035 and increase the proportion of nuclear power in China’s total electricity generation from the current 5 percent to around 10 percent. In 2023, at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the US joined the other 21 countries to jointly launch the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy, with the aim of tripling global nuclear power capacity by 2050. In 2025, the US further upgraded the original target with a plan to construct 10 large-scale nuclear power plants by 2030 and quadruple the US nuclear power capacity by 2050. In March, at the second Nuclear Energy Summit held in Paris, China announced its accession to the declaration. This move injects strong momentum into promoting the sustainable development of global nuclear energy and the green and low-carbon transformation of energy. In this context, China and the US can cooperate in areas such as the development of security standards and supply chain resilience that do not involve sensitive technologies. Building on the 2016 China-US Joint Statement on Nuclear Security Cooperation, the continuous interaction from the two sides will provide a valuable stabilizer for the two countries to maintain communication and avoid misjudgment on a wide range of issues.

The cooperation between China and the US in building energy efficiency and clean coal, including carbon capture, utilization and storage will continue to deepen. The 2022 protocol for institutionalized cooperation between China and the US in the field of clean energy between the US Department of Energy and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Energy Administration still plays a role in ensuring the long-term stability of the mechanism. Currently, the two countries are jointly promoting the industrialization process of carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies through joint research under the protocol on the China-US Joint Research Center for Clean Energy. The high-level meeting between the National Energy Administration and ExxonMobil in December 2025, for example, helped facilitate progress on carbon capture and storage. At the same time, Chinese and US universities are jointly tackling the issue of ecosystem service degradation caused by coal mining. Through building bridges via cooperation, the two countries promote technological innovation and the transformation of achievements in this field, and provide Chinese solutions and US experience for global ecological and environmental governance.

Although federal-level climate policy in the US has exhibited significant volatility due to partisan competition, subnational actors — including state governments, local governments and business coalitions — have continued to advance climate action. According to data from the US Climate Alliance, as of 2024, its member states accounted for approximately 55 percent of the US population and 60 percent of its economic output. When local governments and business coalitions are further included, the regions and organizations that continue to implement various climate actions in the US will cover approximately 65 percent of the population and 70 percent of its GDP.

China is expected to work with all these positive forces to contribute to the steady development of global climate governance, which concerns the fate of all humanity. Strengthening cooperation in this field is not only a pragmatic need, but also holds the potential to become a stabilizing force and a new growth point in China-US bilateral relations.

The author is a research assistant at the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.