Navigating Chinese green deals through green investment, green technology, and green energy development: a race for sustainability or greenwashing?

Abstract Drawing from the recent COP28, which espouses a boom in clean energy transition through technological forwardness, and the framework of the SDG, we address critical questions related to green investment, energy investment, and environmental sustainability. We scrutinize whether green technology genuinely leads to green investment and energy investment in China and whether the causal nexus between these variables holds amid an EKC postulation. We use Chinese provincial data from 1998 to 2020 and deploy the quantile moment-based non-parametric regression technique and the newly developed Granger noncausality strategy. Our findings reveal that energy-related investment significantly improves green investment in China. Similarly, green investment increases energy-related investment. Our empirical findings reveal that green technology does not significantly enhance green investment across the sampled Chinese provinces, which may suggest inconsistencies between technological innovation and firms’ green investment behavior. This could be partially associated with potential greenwashing tendencies observed in some enterprises. This observation also indicates the presence of the greenwashing hypothesis for running enterprises in China. Moreover, financial development and industrial value addition foster both green investment and energy investment in China. Finally, energy and green investment do not support the inhibition of CO 2 emissions in China. However, green technology helps curb CO 2 emissions, which is valid when the EKC hypothesis holds. Overall, this study unravels the presence of the greenwashing hypothesis in China, urging policymakers and regulatory authorities to impose stringent environmental regulations so that enterprises abide by green policies. Our findings have implications for scrapping greenwashing and supporting the attainment of SDGs in China. The findings of this study have important implications in the context of sustainable development in China.