In the past decade, China has regularly shattered clean technology records at home. Simultaneously, it has emerged as a major partner for countries of the Global South seeking to boost renewable energy capacity and pursue low-carbon development.
Domestic clean-tech manufacturers have underpinned China’s vast expansions of solar and wind power, battery capacity and electric vehicles (EVs), and they are now increasingly seeking, and finding, new markets overseas. In 2024, exports of these four technologies from China to the regions of the Global South totalled over US$72 billion, accounting for almost half of all wind, solar and EV exports.
For many countries, these imports have brought a much-needed boost to sustainability efforts, expanding access to electricity and driving booms in renewable capacity. But ambitions among Global South nations to move beyond a trade-only relationship in these goods are being regularly voiced, including in bilateral meetings with Chinese counterparts and in international summits.
The hope is that China can be not just a source of imports for green tech, infrastructure and services, but also a provider of the technology and knowledge that can enable increased manufacturing and innovation within countries’ own borders.
At a diplomatic level, China has long been sensitive to such requests, promoting scholarships to study in China, technical cooperation platforms and “Luban Workshops” for vocational training in partner countries.
Expansions of all such initiatives were pledged to nations as China hosted the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus meeting in Tianjin, for example. But they may not be enough, and such transfer of technology and knowledge is a complex and often contentious topic.
During China’s own rapid industrialisation since Reform and Opening Up began in 1978, Chinese companies themselves benefited from exchanges with European and American partners, as well as in the more recent development of its world-leading solar, wind and EV sectors.
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There is no doubt that the sustainability transition of Global South countries will need support from China in terms of both financing and technology cooperation.
Yixian Sun, principal investigator, Sustainability Governance of China’s Global Infrastructure Investments (SGAIN)
But analysts have told Dialogue Earth of doubts around the incentives and capacity for China’s green tech giants to share their expertise in the clean energy space. Concerning the Global South, meanwhile, they have highlighted relevant initiatives demonstrating the potential of such transfers, but also raised questions about countries’ capacity and leverage to scale up this engagement.
Defining tech transfer
Technology and knowledge transfer have long been sought by countries of the Global South, but have gained renewed attention as global efforts to build up clean energy capacity have surged. These desires are coalescing with calls from developing countries for Global North, as well as Chinese, partners and investors – often their raw material buyers – to support their industrialisation and moves up value chains.
Issues around these transfers from China have been a key point of discussion at recent meetings co-organised by Dialogue Earth. These include a panel event held in Berlin, Germany, alongside the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and an international conference of China researchers, analysts and civil society figures, hosted by the SGAIN project at the University of Bath in England.
“There is no doubt that the sustainability transition of Global South countries will need support from China in terms of both financing and technology cooperation,” Yixian Sun, the SGAIN project’s principal investigator and the Bath conference’s lead organiser, told Dialogue Earth. “Hence, sharing, but more importantly co-developing, knowledge and technologies between China and its southern partners is a necessary step in the global sustainability transition.”
China’s own experience benefiting from such partnerships was highlighted by several attendees at the conference, with BMW’s cooperation with CATL in the early 2010s a prominent example raised by one speaker. CATL is now the world’s largest battery maker.
Anders Hove, a senior research fellow on China at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, described to Dialogue Earth how partnerships with western manufacturers in China’s auto industry “evolved from simple joint venture requirements in the nineties to more sophisticated policies that forced foreign automakers to ensure localisation of core technologies like batteries, electric motors and control systems”.
These exchanges have been a sensitive point in China’s trade relations with the US and the European Union, with allegations that “forced technology transfer” has been demanded of foreign investors – something that China’s 2019 Foreign Investment Law sought to explicitly prohibit.
Rather than a simple “one-way” movement, Hove emphasised that these relationships should be seen as “co-evolution” between partners. He raised the example of the development of China’s solar industry through collaboration with Western partners, to now account for over 80 per cent of global manufacturing: “[It] showed how German and American technicians worked with local manufacturers, creating a back-and-forth co-evolution process rather than one-way transfer.”
Hopes and doubts in Southeast Asia
China’s solar industry has emerged at the forefront of its clean-tech manufacturers’ overseas expansion, with significant growth in global exports of panels and other components during the past decade.
In recent years, Chinese solar manufacturers have also relocated some of their production, notably to Southeast Asia, helping to establish Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia among the top producers and exporters outside China. These relocations have been widely read as a means for manufacturers to evade US tariffs on Chinese-made solar equipment – a trade that is now severely threatened by the Trump administration.
However, with facilities in Southeast Asia focused largely on final assembly, the extent to which knowledge and technology transfer has taken place in these investments was questioned by experts consulted by Dialogue Earth.
According to Hove, “all the know-how remains in China, all parts come from China, and the whole supply chain is still located there. There’s essentially no knowledge diffusion happening, even though there’s solar manufacturing”.
This was echoed by Jessica Liao, an associate professor at North Carolina State University whose research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and Southeast Asia. She described local capacity-building through investments as “limited”. But she also said that calls for such support have been a “rising priority” among Southeast Asian nations.
Liao pointed to Chinese investments in EV manufacturing in Thailand and the nickel industry in Indonesia as areas in which Southeast Asian countries are hoping for support to move up value chains. Nickel is a crucial component in EV batteries and Indonesia already accounts for nearly half of its global production, but the country is also hoping to establish itself among the world’s leading battery producers. CATL recently broke ground on a US$6 billion facility in West Java.
However, Liao questioned the potential for transfers to occur in these sectors: “Most of this manufacturing is really not the knowledge- or technology-intensive part of the EV buildup. So, we haven’t seen any clear case where the host countries are benefitting from the more upstream knowledge, the core knowledge of any of those clean-tech industries.”
As the region’s largest market and economy, Indonesia may be better positioned than its Asean neighbours to benefit from these processes, holding, in Liao’s words, “more bargaining power”. She said that Malaysia may also have some advantages due to its manufacturing capacity, skilled workforce, and large Chinese diaspora populations with a history of doing business with China.
But, she added, “most Asean countries have a modest market size and a lot of regulatory and institutional barriers, so it’s difficult for a Chinese investor to see to what extent there can be knowledge transfer”.
Lessons from Brazil
As South America’s leading industrial hub and home to a well-established clean energy market, Brazil has been a top destination for Chinese green-tech manufacturers’ overseas expansion – and arguably a frontrunner in knowledge and technology transfer partnerships.
Chinese auto giant BYD, the world’s largest EV maker, recently announced that its first Brazil-made vehicles had rolled off its production line in the north-eastern state of Bahia. Fellow manufacturer Great Wall Motors cut the ribbon on an EV factory in São Paulo in August. One of China’s largest wind turbine manufacturers, Goldwind, has also launched a base in Bahia to assemble in Brazil, which is the world’s fifth largest wind power market.
João Cumarú, a Brazil-China specialist and international advisor at Consorcio Nordeste, a development body for Brazil’s north-east region, told Dialogue Earth that knowledge and technology transfer have emerged as “one of the central pillars of the bilateral agenda”.
“During his last visit to China, President Lula pointed out that investments shouldn’t be only about infrastructure – they also need to include education, technology and training people, so Brazil can strengthen its own value chains,” Cumarú added.
In addition to the existing investments in EV and wind turbine manufacturing, Cumarú said there is “a lot of interest in Chinese expertise with critical minerals, especially in refining and processing”, which could help Brazil take advantage of its own reserves.
Several initiatives to directly foster knowledge and technology transfer in green sectors have already been established between the two countries. Both Cumarú and Sun highlighted the China-Brazil Center for Climate Change and Innovative Energy Technology (CCB) as one example.
Created in 2009 via a partnership between the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Tsinghua University in Beijing, the centre promotes academic exchanges and joint development in bioenergy, solar and wind power, and electricity transmission. Cumarú also spoke of cooperation projects in the agricultural sector and sustainable aviation fuel, as well as CBERS, the decades-old China-Brazil satellite programme.
In Cumarú’s view, effective exchanges in these areas depend on strong government support: “You need stable policies, clear rules on intellectual property and incentives for joint ventures.
Mechanisms like the China-Brazil High-Level Coordination Committee can help to set the agenda and make sure things actually move forward.” Finance, too, “is another piece of the puzzle”, and support for such programmes from federal agencies and institutions, such as Brazil’s development bank BNDES, is necessary. “Without resources, cooperation risks staying only on paper.”
Policy signals and preparedness
On the prospects for knowledge and technology transfer between China and Global South countries, experts told Dialogue Earth of barriers in host countries, but also the incentives for Chinese companies, and authorities, to engage.
Anders Hove spoke of “concerning signals” in China’s export controls that may limit the potential for exchanges around technologies such as batteries, which he said have been designated as “sensitive technology”. On balance, he said, “It’s more than half dependent on Global South countries developing their own absorptive capacity, but China’s government policies on technology export controls are equally crucial.”
Jessica Liao, meanwhile, highlighted Chinese companies’ motivations: “Their incentive is really not to help the local economy or local industrialists to have the independent capacity to do it … their primary concern is to help solve their domestic overcapacity problem. Why [would] they have any incentives to reproduce all those as surplus in Southeast Asia again?”
Measures such as export controls signal to clean-tech companies that their core technology should “stay home”, Liao added. These companies “walk a tightrope” to balance government support while pursuing their overseas expansion, she said, “aware that this expansion should really just be at the low end of production”.
Yixian Sun highlighted a differing perspective: “I don’t think Chinese actors are unwilling to transfer or share their technologies to their Global South partners. In many cases, they haven’t done so because there are no viable mechanisms for this, with transfer not only too costly in today’s market, but also challenging due to cultural differences.”
Sun, like all other fellow interviewees, spoke of capacity constraints and a lack of coherent strategies in partner countries: “The challenges in many host countries actually lie in the lack of well-designed policies to promote this, as well as the lack of human resources to absorb relevant technological know-how.”
Hove similarly described human resources as an important factor in technology and knowledge transfer: “You can’t put skills and knowledge in a container. Even if there was some textbook or Wikipedia file that could be transferred, that wouldn’t solve the fundamental human resource challenge that developing countries face.”
The potential of overcoming such constraints and creating the environment for these exchanges may be reflected in the experiences of Brazil – though both Sun and Cumarú said tracking concrete initiatives for knowledge and technology transfer is not straightforward, neither is measuring their impact, which tends to occur in the longer term.
Echoing Hove’s “co-evolution” framing, Sun said this “shouldn’t be a one-way process where Chinese companies pass know-how to their Global South partners. Instead, it should be a mutual learning process, where Chinese actors engage with their Southern partners to develop or improve clean technologies”.
Cui Qiwen contributed additional reporting to this article.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
