The Strait of Hormuz is on fire again, literally. The United States has struck Iran once more, hitting back after attacks on commercial vessels moving through the strait, and it has yanked Iran's oil export permits in the process. Oil prices have spiked in response, and the shipping lanes through Hormuz keep getting choked off as the standoff between Washington and Tehran drags on.
An oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz was struck by a projectile and caught fire.
Beijing has rolled out three moves to take the edge off surging oil prices: tighter energy management, its strategic reserves, and a longer-term shift in its energy mix. Some foreign outlets say this is the second time that China rescues the world economy, with reference to China’s expansion of domestic demand and support for the world economy during the 2008 financial crisis.
The Wall Street Journal's analysis, cited by China News Service, makes the mechanism clear. China's pullback in crude imports has freed up supply for everyone else on the international market. Bertille Bayart, senior economics editor at France's Le Figaro, put it bluntly in a commentary last month: China is once again stabilizing the global economy through its own policy choices, just as it did after 2008.
Foreign media say China is once again rescuing the global economy, just as it did after the 2008 financial crisis.
Rewind to 2008 to see the first act. Markets collapsed, demand dried up, and growth stalled across the globe. China stepped in with a package of counter-cyclical policies that expanded domestic demand and helped pull the world economy out of its slump.
Now the crisis has emerged in the Middle East. The Hormuz Strait carries around 20 million barrels of crude and petroleum products every day, roughly a fifth of global oil transport. Any blockage there sends oil prices soaring, stokes inflation, and throws the world economy into disarray. In some countries, even plastic bags have gotten scarcer and pricier.
Faced with rising energy costs, most countries have scrambled to protect themselves. That has meant hoarding energy resources and throwing up trade barriers, moves that only deepen the global economic pain. China has chosen a markedly different path.
China's crude imports fell 29% year-on-year in May. That single move freed up a large chunk of supply for other countries on the international market. The confidence to cut imports at a critical moment comes from China's massive strategic petroleum reserves, which have also helped keep a lid on prices.
China's crude oil imports fell 29% year-on-year in May, freeing up substantial supply for other countries on the international market.
Dig deeper and the real story is structural. China has spent recent years aggressively building solar, wind, and hydropower, cutting its reliance on traditional fossil fuels. U.S. consulting firm Asia Group notes that even if Hormuz gets disrupted, China's reshaped energy system means its exposure stays relatively limited.
Liu Zhicheng, a researcher at the Academy of Macroeconomic Research under the National Development and Reform Commission, told China News Service that the key to China's response is its comprehensive "ensuring supply and stabilizing prices" policy package. That package has headed off panic over global oil supply and cooled the risk of stagflation. Backed by a solid energy supply system and its strategic reserves, China has kept procurement rational and orderly, avoiding speculative buying and excessive stockpiling while managing refined oil prices directly. These steps protect global energy security and keep supply chains stable.
In effect, China has blocked oil shortages and price spikes from cascading through industrial sectors, kept production running steadily, and kept upstream and downstream links smooth, easing the disruption risks that geopolitical conflict tends to trigger.
That is the "second rescue" in a nutshell. Structural resilience, industrial upgrading, green transformation, and steady macro-control: these are the tools China used to hold a turbulent global economy steady.
Liu sees a bigger story here than oil. This is a demonstration of China's governance capacity under external shock, and proof of the significant role it now plays in keeping the global economy upright.
Mao Paishou
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, energy costs in Germany, a country heavily reliant on Russian natural gas, spun instantly out of control. Electricity prices at one point surged sevenfold, forcing ordinary people to dream up all manner of clever tricks to save on their power bills. One of those tricks has become a distinctive sight on German streets: the "balcony solar" system.
To cut power bills, Germans turned balconies into power plants.
"Balkonkraftwerk": Miracles On Balconies
This simple generating setup costs just a few hundred euros, yet more than 1.33 million units have been installed across Germany in three years. The German government has even amended the law, granting tenants with no rooftop of their own priority installation rights.
What Germans call the "Balkonkraftwerk", or "balcony power plant", is actually just one or two solar panels hung outside the railing, an inverter the size of a shoebox, and a plug that goes into a household socket. The current then flows back into the home: the inverter sets its output voltage slightly higher than the 230V household supply, so solar power feeds in reverse into the wiring. A small storage battery can be added to keep the power coming at night.
The "Balkonkraftwerk": railing-hung panels, a shoebox-sized inverter, one plug.
The principle is not complicated. It works rather like a water supply system. Pipes maintain a steady pressure; turn on the tap and the pressure difference pushes the water out. The grid works the same way. China's standard household voltage is 220V and Germany's is 230V. The inverter in a balcony photovoltaic module simply nudges its output voltage slightly above the socket voltage, pushing solar power back in.
Once the current enters the socket, it is consumed on the spot, "drunk up" by the appliances at home. Less electricity is drawn from the grid, and the meter turns more slowly. If no appliances are running, then in areas where bidirectional metering is permitted, the surplus power flows out of the home along the mains line and back into the grid.
A Few Hundred Euros, Real Money Back
A "balcony power plant" sells for roughly 200 to 500 euros, depending on output. The best-selling 800W model goes for about 350 euros. A solar-plus-storage package with a battery costs between 800 and 1,500 euros.
A granny who lives in Stuttgart finds a 300W system enough to cover her basic needs: lighting, the router and electric fans. She now checks the next day's sunshine forecast every evening. If the sun will be out, she schedules a bike charge or runs the dishwasher. "Save whatever you can," she says.
Granny's 300W system covers her lights, router and fans.
Her nightly ritual: the sunshine forecast. "Save whatever you can."
Weyland, a young man in the northern city of Kiel, hung two panels with a combined output of 600W on the balcony of his rented apartment. In good weather they cover half of his daily electricity use. The whole system cost under 500 euros, yet saves him more than 90 euros a year, a payback period of about five years. These days he spends his time glued to the app, watching the generation figures roll in.
Kiel renter Weyland's two balcony panels total 600W.
In southern Germany, where the sunshine is better, a standard 800W system generates about 750 to 850 kWh a year. At last year's average price of 0.39 euros per kWh, that puts up to 295 to 334 euros a year back in the user's pocket.
For an ordinary household consuming 3,000 kWh a year, saving is about 25 to 28 percent. A single-person household using around 1,500 kWh could ideally save 50 to 57 percent.
No Roof? No Problem
Europe used to put solar panels on rooftops. But more than half of Germany's population lives in rented housing, the highest share in the EU. That means no roof, no land, nowhere to put panels, and no eligibility for the complicated installation and grid-connection approval process.
No roof, no problem: balcony solar is the tenant's lifesaver.
That was when Chinese manufacturers stepped up, Anker Innovations, EcoFlow and Zendure among them. They launched lightweight, low-cost balcony solar kits that skip the tedious paperwork and are far easier to use.
Panels have been slimmed down from the traditional 20kg to just 3 to 5kg. Hook-style railing clamps fix them in place with a few screws. Some models can simply be lashed on with metal cable ties, and they can be taken down easily when moving.
Voltage has dropped from the 600V to 1,000V high-voltage direct current of rooftop solar to a safe 30V to 60V. The plug goes straight into an ordinary socket, and monitoring is done entirely through an app. Installation and use are virtually "zero-threshold". German young people love it. Chinese manufacturers have turned solar "engineering" into a consumer electronics product for everyone.
Berlin Gives the Green Light
The German government has also given the green light. A legislative amendment in May 2024 allows self-installation without prior approval; simple registration afterwards is enough. Balcony solar is now a "privileged installation", on par with disabled-access facilities and EV charging points. Landlords and owners' committees may not block installations on grounds such as "spoiling the view". A landlord who wants to refuse must prove a safety hazard; if the tenant can fix the hazard, the installation goes ahead anyway. The government also waived the 19 percent VAT, and cities including Berlin and Stuttgart have rolled out dedicated subsidies of up to 500 euros. All income from generation is exempt from personal income tax.
With the government "loosening the reins", balcony solar has grown rapidly. Around 260,000 units were added in 2023. The figure soared to 435,000 in 2024, and another 430,000 or so were registered in 2025. That is 1.1 million units installed at lightning speed in three years. By May this year, cumulative installations had reached 1.33 million, the equivalent of more than a thousand German households signing up every day.
Policy green light: install first, register afterwards.
Other European countries have followed suit. The Netherlands had reached 600,000 cumulative installations by the end of 2025, the highest penetration after Germany, with nearly 5 percent of households equipped. Austria has installed 250,000 units, Italy 200,000 and Belgium 150,000.
Made in China, Invisible at Home
Of the solar panels imported into Europe, 98 percent come from China, and 70 percent of micro-inverters are Chinese-supplied. In balcony energy storage, Chinese companies had already secured the first seven places of the top ten best-seller spots in Europe as early as the third quarter of 2024. Industry forecasts see global installed balcony solar capacity exceeding 50 gigawatts by 2030, with China likely to claim more than 40 percent of it.
Yet in China itself, these products are practically invisible in cities. For one thing, electricity in China is genuinely cheap. For another, China follows a "centralized plus distributed" path.
The northwest builds gigawatt-scale centralized solar bases across deserts and the Gobi on a massive scale, using ultra-high-voltage transmission to solve the geographic mismatch. The east develops distributed solar on factory and detached-house rooftops. Rural rooftops easily run to tens or even hundreds of square meters, accommodating 20kW to 50kW systems. That is dozens of times the generating capacity of balcony solar.
With no domestic demand to speak of, Chinese companies have nonetheless struck overseas demand with pinpoint precision and taken command of the global balcony solar market. The same story has played out with saddle-style window air conditioners, fully automatic lawnmowers, electric-assist bicycles and AI game-tracking cameras. To Western politicians, China's technological rise is a threat. But to ordinary people abroad, Chinese products have made life better, time and again.
