Former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peggy Liu, an energy adviser to the Clinton Global Initiative, is based in Shanghai nowadays.

Named by Forbes business magazine as one of its Women to Watch in Asia, Liu, who will speak at Nor-Shipping, is chair of the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE).

“Wherever I go, people have a narrative about China’s environmental landscape. By the time I am finished, they are quite shocked. It is very different from what they expect,” she tells TW+.

“China is one of the largest investors in green technology in the world. It is intent on going green — and it will be a very rapid journey.”

The country is building more than 200 new large cities (already half of them home to more than one million people) with huge energy and transport ramifications. All of them will be linked externally and internally by rail networks.

A further $724bn is targeted at investment in transport infrastructure in the three years to 2020. Shanghai’s metro system is expected to be twice as long as London’s by then, and the city is connected to Beijing by high-speed rail services.

Some 30,000km of high-speed lines will link 80% of the country’s biggest cities by the same date.

The next step is international. China’s One Belt, One Road policy is a 50-year vision to connect 65 countries by rail and sea. “Transport is the sexiest part of sustainability,” Liu says.

She admits that China is not good at getting a PR message across, but its seriousness can be gleaned from its policy white papers and five-year plans.

By 2012, China was already the global leader for financial investment in renewable energy. It aims to generate 20% of its power from renewables by 2030 (equivalent to building an entire new US power network) and its most optimistic forecasts predict that figure will reach 60% by 2050.

The Chinese can plan smart cities because their leadership is drawn from technocrats, scientists, engineers and economists.

And they are taking steps that affect the maritime sphere: China has a stated aim of reducing energy consumption within its logistic systems by 20%.

The country has funded mass experiments with clean vehicles across 13 cities, Liu says, knowing that most projects will fail, but that the successes can then be replicated on a giga-scale.

She says China is stopping construction of coal power plants and has reached peak oil demand — again with important ramifications for commodity shippers.

But these are not the only maritime issues that interest Liu.

Dumping plastic waste from ships is on her radar, as well as efforts to grow kelp in marine aquaculture and mangrove plantations along coasts. They can provide greater carbon sinks than trees or grasslands, she says.