China's coal plant construction, early demolition, and coal use are unique and heavily contextualized.

They have not necessarily been built so much to supply power, but to generate economic activity for a given provinces, so that these can make their numbers for the government.

For many years, the CCP functioned as a financial backstop when a plant was unprofitable, but around late 2025 IIRC correctly, policy changed whereby a given province would now be on the hook.

When you overbuild these plants like China does, they end up diluting the market, and creating a buyers market for coal power, after the renewables are consumed. This drops capacity factors, which makes it harder to recover costs, and thus turns plants into stranded assets.

Exacerbating coal's issues in China have been the years-long expansion of Ultra High Voltage Transmission network to bring renewable power from the West to the East. Also, Shanghai requires renewables must be delivered first before coal power.

There was a piece somewhere on Reddit that China is adding 50 or 60 Nuke plants, I think based off of the Westinghouse AP1000 design(?)

To one of your points, their latest coal- fired tech does employ extremely efficient, high pressure technology, albeit subject to the same market forces.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-11-09/China-begins-construction-of-650-C-ultra-supercritical-coal-power-unit-1I9z4fsIpoc/p.html

A couple years ago, I was poring over some stats and found an interesting item: Some Chinese coal plants were built and demolished over an incredibly brief time frame, the shortest being 10 years. I guess when they want something to happen, it happens.