China’s Xie Zhenhua is the most important person attending COP26

When leaders of the world meet in Glasgow next week to hammer out the next stage of battling climate change, it’s likely that Chinese leader Xi Jinping won’t be present. Instead the task of promoting and defending China’s position will fall—as it often has for more than a decade—to Xie Zhenhua, China’s special climate envoy.

For those who closely watch the Chinese climate policy space, that’s a good thing. The now 71-year-old climate negotiator has been a crucial figure in China’s climate policy shift toward making binding commitments, without which the global climate effort would be pointless. At the same time, Xie has often forcefully iterated China’s stance that rich countries with a historically larger contribution to emissions have a greater responsibility than China—the world’s largest carbon emitter since 2006.

In 2014, Xie and then secretary of state John Kerry—selected last year by president Joe Biden as the US’s first presidential climate envoy—hammered out a climate pact that helped move past a longstanding impasse between the US and China. That agreement was vital for the successful negotiation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, a landmark global climate treaty that has the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. When the two men met again this past April, the world’s two biggest emitters, though embroiled in ongoing tensions, managed to issue a joint statement about the importance of tackling the climate crisis, and pave the way for Xi to attend a US-hosted virtual climate summit.

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