As Cop26 drew to a close over the weekend, Chinese media highlighted Beijing’s contribution over the last fortnight in Glasgow. “The Chinese delegation took a constructive attitude, actively communicated and negotiated with all parties,” said CCTV’s main evening news bulletin on Sunday. “[It] provided China’s wisdom and China’s solution …”

But when China and India chose the last few hours of negotiations to push for the language on coal to be diluted from “phase out” to “phase down”, both countries came under nearly immediate fire from commentators. Cop president Alok Sharma later urged both countries to “explain themselves and what they did to the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world”.

On Monday Beijing kicked the ball back to developed nations. Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson at China’s foreign ministry, said that before asking all countries to stop using coal, developed countries should remember how far many developing countries need to travel in order to find sustainable ways to provide electricity for their citizens. “We encourage developed countries to take the lead in stopping using coal while providing ample funding, technological and capacity-building support for developing countries’ energy transition. We need concrete actions more than slogans.”

Developed countries have not yet delivered on all their promises, he pointed out in answer to a question from the Communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, at Monday’s regular press briefing. “There were regrets and deficiencies at the session, and the global response to climate change still faces many challenges.”

The framing of the negotiations as developing versus developed nations was clearly aimed at China’s domestic audience, analysts say. During the first week of Cop26, as international media criticised Xi for not turning up in person, a decade-old video clip of the Chinese representative, Xie Zhenhua, resurfaced and went viral on Chinese social media.

In it, an angry Xie criticised developed countries for putting too much pressure on developing nations in a string of parallel sentences. “We need to develop, we need to eradicate poverty, we need to protect the environment. We have done everything we could. We have also done things you have not done. What qualifications do you have to teach me here?”

Xie’s past fury prompted social media users last week to start a hashtag with a line from Xie: #sloganscannotreplaceactions. On Weibo this hashtag has been viewed more than 1.3m times.

Read more in The Guardian.