Golden sun, green economy: market security and the US/EU-China ‘solar trade war’

China's solar manufacturing and R&D industry has developed rapidly since 2000: by 2010, 40% of the world's solar panels were manufactured in China. This has occurred as a result of strategic government economic planning, which has included concerns about energy security, energy diversity, and about the stimulation of a renewables-based green economy. The growth of China's solar industry has been marked since 2011 by what has come to be termed a “Solar Trade War” between the EU, the USA and China. The paper analyzes the heterogeneous framing of China's solar energy industry by corporate, nongovernmental and government actors in the USA and European Union. In so doing, the paper aims to critically investigate the production of specific market knowledge(s) that are not only instrumental and rational, but based on often-contradictory discursive constructions of an apparently merely technological and economic phenomenon such as the production of solar modules.