The rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic of China must be closely observed by all nations and regions, big and small, including Trinidad and Tobago and Caricom. The two global behemoths now lead an energy race between “petrostates” prioritising fossil fuels, like the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia, and “electrostates” pursuing electrification and clean energy, like China and Europe.
China is leading here. While the US, under President Donald Trump, banks heavily on oil and gas, wanting countries to buy oil from America, including Venezuela’s, to power their cars, trucks, ships and planes for decades to come; China, the world’s largest oil importer, is pushing intensively, under President Xi Jinping, at substituting electricity for oil, with batteries and electric power at the centre of this contest.
China wants “a world powered by electric motors rather than gas-guzzling engines,” writes Dan Wang in the New York Times. “A decisively 21st-century approach to solve its own energy problems and also sell batteries and other electric products to everyone else.”
China’s growing electric-powered network incorporates cars, homes, factories and global trade. And the opportunity to electrify almost everything else will grow over the next decade with Beijing leading the charge.
In 2000, China produced only one-third the amount of electrical power as the United States. It now generates more electricity each year than the US and European Union combined. Installed capacity of renewable energy-wind, solar, biomass, hydropower- make up a record high of 56 per cent of the nation’s total. It has close to 40 new nuclear power reactors under construction, compared with zero in America. Last year, Beijing announced work on a new hydropower dam in Tibet that will have triple the capacity of China’s Three Gorges, currently the world’s largest power station. In 2025, 54 per cent of new cars sold in China were either battery-powered or plug-in hybrids; and globally, it sold almost 11 million EVs, a 24.2per cent increase that accounted for 63.7 per cent of the global market. Dan Wang says, “America had better shape up to an electric age ushered in by Beijing, which will conquer markets through better technology.”
US/China tensions have reached a high point under Trump as President. David Pierson, in the New York Times, says after the tariffs and technology restrictions experienced during the first Trump administration, the Chinese President laid out his vision in April 2020 to senior party officials for turning the tables on the United States. Jinping said Chinese leaders must “tighten the dependence on our country by international production chains, thereby forming a powerful capacity to counter and deter foreign parties from artificially disrupting supplies” to China.
Then came COVID. Global trade ground to a halt and exposed the extent to which the United States and the world needed China for everything “from surgical masks to pain medicines.”
Recognising this enormous power, Beijing capitalised. It ignored Washington’s concerns about the trade imbalance, refused to open its economy to more foreign companies, did not buy more US products, and did not stop subsidising factories and state-owned companies that drove many American manufacturers out of business.
Xi Jinping saw the opportunity for his long-conceived plan to make the world dependent on China’s exports and expertise. In the five years after 2020, he made China the unassailable “workshop of the world,” manufacturing everything the world needs and dominating supply of these products “to make its adversaries think twice about using tariffs or trying to cut China off.” Towards this end, China’s central bank lent nearly US$2 trillion to industrial borrowers over four years; while the government “introduced new weapons of economic warfare to the country’s arsenal: export controls, antimonopoly laws and blacklists for hitting back at American companies.”
When, therefore, Trump, in his second term, came with his mass tariffs of 145 per cent on Chinese goods, Beijing immediately went on the offensive with import duties on American goods of 125 per cent, bringing trade between the global giants to a virtual standstill. Markets plummeted; companies rerouted, importing more from countries like Vietnam and Mexico. Indeed, after Trump’s tariffs plunged China’s shipments to the US by 21 per cent, China fed its export machine by increasing exports to Southeast Asian countries, also by 21 pe rcent.
The tariffs became unbearable for US businesses. US/China trade talks were held in Geneva, where Trump walked back his triple-digit tariffs, reducing his 145 per cent tax on Chinese imports to 30 per cent! Reciprocating, China lowered its import duty on American goods to 10 per cent from 125 per cent. “An almost complete US retreat,” said Scott Kennedy, China expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Most importantly, Beijing had responded not only with its own taxes, but with restrictions on exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets over which it had established almost global control, “minerals essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles.” This tipped the balance. It “made the world reliant on China, and China reliant on no one,” says Kirsten Asdal, former intelligence adviser in the US Department of Defence.
The race is on. Petrostate, USA versus electrostate, China.
