Pollution is a huge problem for them also. It got really bad in places like Beijing, people here in the western USA complain about forest fires, but 150 ppm AQI would be a clean air day in Beijing’s winter. It is survival for them, since people simply can’t live like that.

Carbon is a much more abstract problem even in the USA, since you don’t feel climate change right away like you smell black dirt gas air. But that only really matters for high carbon low pollution energy sources like natural gas, and China doesn’t have so much of that anyways to use it in lieu of renewables.