Today, we're continuing our series on China's external investments in the energy field, focusing in particular on China's outbound investments in clean energy manufacturing.

Our guest today is Mathias Larsen. Mathias is Senior Policy Fellow at LSE's Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change & the Environment, where he leads the Institute's work on China, and he also studies China's impact on other countries outside the global North, in particular, Vietnam, India, Ethiopia, and Brazil. His work focuses on the role of the state in ensuring financing for a green transition, covering central banking, fiscal policy, development finance, and other tools related to industrial policy.

Mathias has a double PhD in international political economy from Copenhagen Business School and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a double Master's degree in international business and politics from Copenhagen Business School and Rotterdam School of Management, as well as a double Master's degree in international development from Sciences Po Paris and Peking University. He previously worked as a Postdoc at Brown University, at the International Institute of Green Finance, as well as at the UN in New York, Bangkok, and Nairobi.

Topics we cover include:

The trend change in China's green outbound investment that started in 2022.
Which regions are attracting which kinds of investments.
Whether countries are really seeing development opportunities in this stream of investment -- and what they can do to maximize their chances of development.
China's central bank policies which include both national development priorities as well as macroeconomic stability, without the strict independence traditionally expected of central banks.
Whether such policies could offer a lesson for others.
China's outbound green hydrogen investments in the Mideast.
Saudi Arabia's strategy on green hydrogen.

For further reading:

https://www.netzeropolicylab.com/china-green-leap

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2025/12/10/while-western-central-banks-hesitate-on-climate-chinas-acts/

https://www.carboun.com/china-hydrogen