The Great Green Game: How Europe Lost Cleantech Primacy to China

For a decade, Europe was supposed to be the lab and the workshop of the green future. It wrote the rules, set the targets, and incubated early clean technologies. Then China overtook it—at speed and at scale. By the mid-2020s, Chinese firms dominated electric vehicles, wind turbines, batteries, and key upstream components, exporting clean technologies so cheaply that they reshaped global energy markets. Europe, by contrast, found itself scrambling for tariffs, crisis subsidies, and industrial exceptions, watching its flagship sectors drift toward strategic dependence. In his talk, Cornel Ban explains how that reversal happened—and why prevailing explanations get China wrong.

Cornel Ban studies how states use economic tools to pursue power and manage global challenges within the constraints of their growth models and capabilities, with a focus on how trade, finance, coordinative institutions, and technology policy are deployed in struggles over global order. He also examines the green transition, exploring how governments and societies (dis)reorganize around climate goals.

Suggested preparatory reading:

Ban, Cornel, and Stine Quorning. 2026. "Green Monetary Transitions? Central Banking and Climate Finance in Europe and China." Socio-Economic Review, mwag003.

Li, Xuan, and Cornel Ban. 2026. "Financing Technological Innovation in China: Neo-developmental Financial Statecraft Through Government Guidance Funds." Review of International Political Economy 33 (1): 131–161.

Ban, Cornel, and Jacob Hasselbalch. 2025. "Green Economic Planning for Rapid Decarbonisation." New Political Economy 30 (2): 287–299.

Ban, Cornel. 2026. "The Beautiful and the Smelted: Industrial Policy Regimes for Critical Minerals in China, Europe and the United States." Stato e mercato 46 (1): 59–99.