War has a way of making energy security feel suddenly intimate. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has severely disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices soaring and pushing governments in Asia to make emergency moves. Sri Lanka has imposed fuel rationing and shortened the public workweek. India has cut industrial LPG supply to protect household cooking gas. The Republic of Korea has capped domestic fuel prices for the first time in nearly three decades. Oil supply shocks always cast a shadow on kitchens, commutes and family budgets.

China, too, has felt the pressure of higher oil prices. But things are a little different here. On Chinese highways, not all vehicles stop for oil. Some stop for recharging. Charging posts have become part of the urban landscape, be it in apartment compounds or in underground parking lots of shopping malls.

Kaixiangong village in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, has a "10-minute charging circle" and there's a "3-minute" one in its scenic area. What once looked like future infrastructure is already here, even in the countryside.

Behind these changing scenes in everyday life there is a much larger shift. By the end of 2025, China had nearly 44 million new energy vehicles on the road and had built the world's largest EV charging network. Renewable energy already makes up more than 60 percent of the country's installed power capacity, and the International Energy Agency expects China to account for nearly 60 percent of global renewable capacity growth through 2030. What would have been a statistical milestone on a normal day actually serves as a buffer during the oil shock.

That matters because the transition to renewable energy has long been framed as a burden. Many countries still treat climate policy as costly, inconvenient and politically difficult. However, China's story shows that green transition not only reduces emissions, but also reduces dependence on imported fossil fuels, softens price shocks and adds resilience. It is also economically viable. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, globally, 91 percent of new renewable projects commissioned in 2024 generated electricity at prices cheaper than the cheapest fossil-fuel alternatives. What once looked like a sacrifice now has a practical payoff.

That helps explain two recent developments. On March 10, the United Kingdom announced that from April 1 it would remove tariffs on 33 industrial goods used in offshore wind manufacturing. Two days later, the United States International Trade Commission ruled against imposing "anti-dumping" and "countervailing" duties on active anode material from China.

The timing is hard to miss. For years, the political instinct in the West was to raise barriers against Chinese clean-energy products. For example, in 2024, the US raised tariffs on Chinese EVs to 100 percent, on solar cells to 50 percent and on lithium-ion EV batteries to 25 percent. Yet as oil prices rise and energy security comes under strain, the mood has turned more pragmatic. These moves suggest that once costs climb and supply tightens, politicizing every green-energy transaction becomes much harder to sustain.

And while neither the UK nor the US explicitly mentioned "China" in their latest moves, the implication was clear. The IEA says China is expected to remain the world's largest manufacturing hub for major wind components, with 50 to 70 percent of global capacity. China's scale has helped push clean-energy equipment down the cost curve and out into world markets. That is why green development can do both jobs: it can serve the climate as well as strengthen energy security. That may be one of the clearest lessons this war has delivered.

- Yao Yuxin, China Daily