Actually, a lot of the things you would traditionally think of as "made in China" aren't made there anymore. They've made an effort to pivot their economy more towards high-added-value manufacturing, like electronics, and away from labor-intensive low-cost bulk goods like clothing and little plastic knickknacks. Most of the cheap stuff moved to various parts of Southeast Asia.

Also, what reason do you have to believe that China is not investing in renewables? They're an emerging superpower with minimal fossil fuel reserves, reliant on international shipping to keep the lights on. They want to be energy-independent so they don't need to worry about starving of electricity if the US were to blockade the South China Sea from the string of naval bases it has on allied islands, or their oil pipelines from the Middle East getting sabotaged.

Additionally, the numbers they report aren't actually all that impressive for what they've built. Chinese hydroelectric dams have pretty low levels of efficiency, and they've displaced literal millions of people to build them, and done some pretty brutal damage to local ecosystems in the process.

That doesn't sound like some sort of attempt at winning good-boy points in hopes that it'll make NATO like you, it sounds like a major nation-state attempting to secure energy independence by any means necessary, which is very common in geopolitics.