The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly:
- The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past.
- Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)
- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.
- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.
So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
My whole post was an ask for more information on the Chinese side (each of my 3 phrases were asking this!), which you have provided thank you very much, but I could do without the "you're dumb" when I ask a question.
But none of that matters, China would pursue massive solar power infrastructure regardless, because they want energy independence. Stupid amounts of solar power means they will no longer be importing lots of oil and fuel, and that means they would be less vulnerable to the US blockading them in some sort of conflict, which is one of their primary geopolitical concerns.
They would do this even if solar power was dramatically less effective or was significantly more expensive, because solar power is the first kind of power generation that it is economical to way overbuild, and have serious redundancy and surplus and excess, because there's no consumables that scale your running costs like if you tried to build massive amounts of coal power plants.
China would like to have that kind of scale for power because they can use it to subsidize things like datacenters running less efficient Chinese made computer components. The fact that power doesn't have to run a profit in China helps this.
The US should be taking fucking notes, about how nationalized infrastructure can be a force multiplier economically, and how infrastructure that doesn't have to be profitable can be even more powerful.
Slaving ourselves to the enrichment of well connected capital owners is harming our country, and preventing a literal energy revolution. We have the option to, for the first time in human history, actually have energy resources that are too cheap to meter.
Therefore reaching self sufficiency in terms of power generation will make this threat less relevant and an enemy will no be able to use it to make them back off.