The world will not be able to achieve sustainable transition without China, yet there is both significant neglect and confusion regarding Chinese environmental innovation and its potential impact. We consider a framework for analysis of this crucial but confounding issue in terms of complex power/knowledge systems (CPKS) and innovation-as-politics. This sets up a quadrant into which evidence from this essentially contested debate may be arranged. The analysis illuminates the exceptional dynamism of Chinese innovation, which is driving seismic socio-technical and socio-political change, increasingly at global scale. The significance of Chinese innovation is thus grasped not in terms of what it is itself delivering directly, but rather how it is driving social turbulence that then, in turn, is disrupting incumbent socio-technical systems. As such, it is leading the world backwards into the Anthropocene, not forging boldly ahead. The argument is illustrated with the ‘hardest case’ of sustainable transition of (digitized) urban mobility.