By G. Dunkel
December 5, 2025

This article, edited by Natalia Burdyńska, is a chapter in the book “China Changes Everything,” just released by Friends of Socialist China. The book launch will take place on Saturday, Dec. 6, at 4:00 pm eastern time at the International Action Center, 121 West 27th Street, Suite 404, New York, NY 10001.

When the sun goes down, half of the people on the African continent — about 700 million people — have to live in the dark. They don’t have reliable access to electricity and thus have limited access to modern education, economic growth or ways to improve their quality of life. Of the dozens of countries in the world where more than a third of the population still has no access to electricity, only a tiny few, such as Haiti and Papua New Guinea, are not in Africa.

This lack of access is largely the legacy of colonialism. The European great powers of the late nineteenth century, in their insatiable quest to enrich themselves by dominating the world, neglected to build infrastructure in their colonies that was not directly necessary for the cultivation of cash crops and the extraction of resources for profit.

While a few countries on the continent, like Egypt and Tunisia, now have 100% access, they are considering, along with the African countries with low access rates, installing low-priced Chinese solar panels to harness Africa’s tremendous potential for using the sun to produce electricity. Importing China’s renewable energy technology, which produces electricity from widely available and extremely inexpensive inputs — sunlight and wind — has become far more attractive to the post-colonial world than importing fossil fuel technology from the United States.

China: World Leader in Solar Power

During the 2000s, the nascent Chinese solar industry was a minor player, both on the world stage and domestically. Solar panels were too expensive for the Chinese market and were thus only viable as an export commodity. This led to disaster in 2012 when China lost access to the European market for solar power following the Great Recession and the subsequent eurozone debt crisis.

SunTech and LDK Solar, two of China’s largest solar energy firms at the time, went bankrupt. The government’s efforts to develop solar technology were widely considered wasteful; according to Chinese economist Dr. Lan Xiaohuan, the solar industry was heavily criticized in the media as “a byword for the failure of state-led industrial policies and government subsidies” during the early 2010s. (Xiaohuan Lan, “How China Works: An Introduction to China’s State-Led Economic Development”)

Nevertheless, according to Lan, subsidies and industrial policy were essential to the subsequent expansion of China’s solar industry and the country’s rise to become the undisputed world leader in solar power a decade later. Subsidies, when employed properly, allow competing industry players the latitude to undercut each other, effectively lowering the price of their products.

Since 2012, the price of solar energy has fallen like a stone, while the expansion of solar capacity in China has risen at an unprecedented rate. In May 2025, in a rush to take advantage of lucrative government subsidies, Chinese solar firms installed nearly a hundred gigawatts of new solar capacity domestically — more than any other country had installed in all of 2024 — and set the world record for the most solar installations in a single month. (Bloomberg.com, June 23)

Today, China is on track to account for over half of all the world’s renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade. It also manufactures “over 80 percent of capacity and production in all stages of the solar [photovoltaic] supply chain, including polysilicon, wafers, cells and modules,” according to Chen Wei, executive deputy director of China’s Photovoltaic Industry IP Operation Center. (xhby.net, Sept. 21, 2024)

In other words, China not only produces solar panels but also their components for other countries to assemble.

Solar Power in Africa

Because their own domestic market has become saturated and the U.S. market is blocked by confiscatory tariffs, Chinese solar firms have launched a major campaign to sell their products to African countries who need and want to expand their electrical production.

A recent report from Ember, a global energy think tank, describes how solar panel imports from China into the African continent jumped 60% in the 12 months preceding June 2025, setting a record that could transform many of the countries involved. Both small and poor countries, like Mali and Malawi, as well as large, middle-income countries like Algeria, Nigeria and South Africa are importing Chinese solar panels.

According to Ember, the impact of installing these panels will be significant: “If all solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months alone were installed, they would be able to generate electricity equivalent to 61% of reported electricity generation in 2023, the latest available data.

For Chad, it would be 49%. In five other countries, imports in total could add electricity equivalent to more than 10% of reported 2023 generation — Liberia (25%), Somalia (15%), Eritrea (15%), Togo (11%), Benin (10%). Altogether, 16 countries would see an increase of at least 5%.” (ember-energy.org, 2025)

Chad, the country the report identified as potentially seeing the most dramatic effects from solar power imports, is a landlocked country in the turbulent Sahel region, at the crossroads of North and Central Africa. It has a population of around 20 million people, which, according to the International Rescue Committee, includes 1.5 million refugees, most of whom have fled civil conflict in Chad’s eastern neighbor, Sudan.

Currently, only 6.4% of Chad’s population has access to electricity. The government of Chad is planning to raise its electrification rate to 30% by 2027 and to 53% by 2030 using inexpensive Chinese solar panels. It plans to build a solar park in N’Djamena, its capital, with batteries to store power for nighttime access. (econmatin.net, Dec. 12, 2024)

Once this is done, it intends to take what it has learned in N’Djamena to the rest of the country, where it will construct three hybrid power stations in other cities (installations that combine solar, wind, hydro and fossil fuel power with battery storage).

Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi, a senior research associate at the Sino-Uganda Institute in Kampala, summed up the impact of China’s exports of renewable energy technology in the following way: “As the leading global player in green/clean energy, China has played a pivotal role in Africa’s green energy transition through its investments in exploring solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear projects at their early stages on the continent.

“Through FOCAC (Forum on China-Africa Cooperation), China has addressed Africa’s pressing need for sustainable, accessible and reliable energy while at the same time aligning with both the global climate goals as well as its own strategic shift towards green energy development. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, China has reshaped the energy infrastructure, installing over 23 gigawatts of electricity capacity in 27 countries.” (dwcug.org, Aug. 3)

The Chinese Solar Industry Goes International

Africa is not the only beneficiary of Chinese renewable energy exports. Throughout the Global South – Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and much of Asia – developing countries are experiencing solar revolutions as China’s remarkably cheap solar panels and photovoltaic components flood in.

Recently, Cuba has seen its entire electrical grid fail multiple times as the country has struggled to maintain its aging infrastructure under the brutal U.S. trade embargo that has isolated the island country for generations, depriving it of fuel and system components.

But now, as Reuters reported in June 2025, China is financing dozens of new solar electricity projects across the island, nine of which were complete and already producing 400 megawatts of power, with nearly twice as much new capacity expected to be online by the end of the year. These installations provide a lifeline to Cuba’s electrical system: by 2028, they are projected to cover nearly two-thirds of the present national demand for electricity, which could finally make blackouts a thing of the past.

As summers in Pakistan grow hotter and hotter, demand for electricity has increased, putting immense strain on its similarly outdated infrastructure. The International Monetary Fund recently forced the country to end its energy subsidies that had made electricity affordable to the population, and as a result, the price of electricity has doubled since 2022.

Overwhelmingly, the Pakistani people have responded to the crisis by buying Chinese solar panels. Solar panels now adorn the roofs of homes, small businesses and even neighborhood mosques throughout the country. An expert from the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute called the rate at which solar power is being adopted in Pakistan to be unmatched by anywhere else in the world. (Betsy Joles, “Pakistan Is Tapping into Solar Power at an ‘unprecedented’ Rate. Here’s Why.”)

In June 2025, Reuters reported that Pakistan had increased its solar energy capacity by over three times the global average so far that year and is now one of fewer than 20 countries in the world that source more than a quarter of their electricity from solar power. (reuters.com, June 17)

Experts from Ember, in its 2025 review of China’s energy transition, called China’s clean energy development model a “key engine of economic progress” that, in addition to driving other countries away from fossil fuels, is developing new technology, creating jobs and delivering economic growth.

In 2022, China’s share of patent applications related to clean energy technology was over three times greater than the rest of the world combined. The total solar manufacturing capacity needed globally by 2030 to meet the International Energy Agency’s road map to net-zero emissions by 2050 has already been reached by China alone, and by 2030, China’s solar manufacturing capacity is projected to exceed the IEA’s goal by 65%.

There is no question that the People’s Republic of China is indispensable to any solution to global climate change, as well as the world’s best and quickest pathway out of the colonial underdevelopment that has kept so much of it in darkness for so many years.

After getting a degree in applied mathematics, Gregory Dunkel worked in data processing until retirement. He is a contributing editor for Workers World and occasionally writes for Haïti-Liberté. He is one of the authors of the book “Haiti: A Slave Revolution.”