When Emmanuel Macron called in Davos for greater inflows of Chinese foreign direct investment into Europe, including technology transfer and tangible contributions to economic growth, his remarks sounded like a small crack in the dominant EU narrative. This was not a signal of changing alliances or revising values. It was a pragmatic acknowledgement of a reality that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: Europe is gradually losing its ability to sustain industrial momentum on its own. Even parts of its political core are beginning to see it.
It should be stated clearly that this is not a debate about the legitimacy of China’s political system or the ideology governing Beijing. The starting point is far narrower and more practical. The question is whether Europe is still capable of using available technologies, capital, and know-how to rebuild its industrial base before that capacity is irreversibly lost.
This distinction is particularly relevant for the EU’s peripheral states. For them, the energy transition is not an abstract climate objective outlined in strategic documents, but a process that directly determines the future of entire regions, labour markets, and industrial sectors. Poland is a textbook case.
For decades, coal formed the backbone of Poland’s energy system, industrial development, and economic security. Today, in EU-level debates, it is treated almost exclusively as an environmental liability to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Public discussion has narrowed to a false binary: Whether mines should be closed more quickly or more slowly. What is largely absent is a serious conversation about what to do with existing infrastructure, industrial competencies, and, crucially, the people whose livelihoods are tied to this sector.
Outside Europe, this question has already been answered differently. Major global players are not abandoning coal outright. They are redefining its function. Coal is increasingly treated not as a fuel to be burned, but as an industrial input to be processed. Where Europe framed the issue primarily in moral and regulatory terms, others approached it as an engineering and industrial challenge.
This transition is not unique to China, although Beijing remains the technological leader in this field. India is implementing national coal gasification programmes to secure fertilizer and fuel production. South Africa has relied for decades on coal-to-liquids technologies as a pillar of its fuel and chemical industries. These are not ideological choices, but calculated strategies aimed at resource sovereignty, price stability, and supply security.
Against this backdrop, EU policy increasingly resembles a strategy of managed industrial dismantling. The European Green Deal, rather than functioning as a modernisation impulse, has in practice accelerated the relocation of energy-intensive industries beyond the continent. Emissions do not disappear; they are outsourced. What Europe loses are jobs, technological capabilities, and control over strategic value chains.
Poland, meanwhile, holds the largest hard coal reserves in the European Union, measured in billions of tons of industrial-grade resources sufficient for decades of chemical processing. This is not a declining relic of the past, but a potential foundation for a modern chemical and industrial hub serving Central Europe. The condition is a paradigm transformation.
Such a transformation would allow Poland to produce ammonia for agriculture, stabilizing fertilizer markets in the region and reducing dependence on imports. It would enable the development of high-margin synthetic fuels, including aviation fuels whose importance will grow under decarbonisation pressure. It would reposition the chemical industry as a strategic asset rather than a regulatory problem. Carbon capture and utilisation technologies make it possible to integrate heavy industry with emissions reduction goals, instead of placing them in permanent conflict.
The argument that Europe lacks the necessary technologies is only partially true. In many cases, it lacks them because it chose not to develop them. Where Brussels identified a political liability, others identified an industrial opportunity. This is where the issue of technological cooperation, rather than ideological alignment, becomes decisive.
Even within the EU, examples of pragmatic engagement already exist. The Port of Piraeus, once a symbol of Greece’s economic collapse and near-infrastructural bankruptcy, is today one of the fastest-growing ports in the Mediterranean following its acquisition and modernisation by China’s COSCO Shipping. Greece did not lose sovereignty. The region gained jobs, fiscal revenues, and logistical relevance. China gained strategic access to infrastructure. A clear win-win outcome that Europe itself was either unwilling or unable to deliver.
Hungary has followed a similar logic by positioning itself as a key destination for Chinese industrial investment in Central Europe. The CATL battery plant in Debrecen, the largest foreign direct investment in Hungary’s history, will employ thousands and embed the country in global value chains of advanced technologies critical to electrification and energy storage. This is not a political gesture, but a deliberate industrial strategy.
These investments also create opportunities for regional synergies. Poland could become a centre for synthetic fuel and chemical production, with Hungary, possessing its own airlines, naturally serving as a downstream consumer for aviation fuels. This coordination links resources, production, and demand across borders, demonstrating industrial ecosystem thinking at the regional level.
Importantly, such a model does not contradict the European Green Deal. It represents its practical implementation rather than its rhetorical version. EU instruments such as the Just Transition Fund already exist to support regions undergoing structural transformation. In this configuration, China provides technology, Poland provides resources and industrial capacity, and the EU provides financing. Poland leverages its historical assets to reindustrialise, the EU achieves tangible emissions reductions while preserving industrial capacity, and China gains a strategic economic stake in the heart of Europe. A clear win-win-win outcome.
This leads to a defining question for Europe’s climate and industrial policy: Will the evangelical greens in the EU continue to treat any large-scale use of coal as inherently incompatible with zero-emissions objectives, or will Europe finally see that its climate goals can be met precisely by eliminating dirty coal use through intelligent industrial processing, rather than by dismantling its own industrial base?
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