Book: China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market by Alex Y. Lo & Chen Xiang (Edward Elgar Publishing) | Reviewed by: Geoffrey C. Chen (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) | Journal: Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 56, 2026 | Review published: March 2026
About the Book and Authors
China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market is authored by Alex Y. Lo (York Business School, York St John University, UK) and Chen Xiang (School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China), and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. Together, Lo and Chen Xiang have produced significant scholarship on Chinese environmental governance, including their widely cited "Authoritarian Environmentalism 2.0: An Incremental Transition of Environmental Governance in China" (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2025), which introduced the "AE 2.0" framework — describing how China's authoritarian environmentalism has evolved to incorporate selective market mechanisms and limited participatory elements while retaining its essentially top-down, state-led character.
What the Book Covers
The book provides a comprehensive analysis of China's major policy interventions for decarbonising the economy and managing climate risks over the past decade. According to the JCA reviewer, it offers "a critical examination of the institutionalisation [of climate governance] and the structural challenges for China's climate policy over the past decade," and "situates China's climate governance within the broader context of global environmental politics."
The book's analytical framework engages with several major theoretical traditions in the scholarly literature on Chinese environmental governance:
1. Environmental Authoritarianism / Authoritarian Environmentalism
The concept originally formulated by Bruce Gilley in his 2012 article — a non-participatory approach to public policymaking in the face of severe environmental challenges. Gilley's original argument was that authoritarian environmentalism produces effective policy outputs (targets, regulations, investment) but struggles to produce policy outcomes (actual emissions reductions, environmental quality improvements) because it lacks the feedback mechanisms and civic pressure that drive compliance in democratic systems.
2. Centralised Developmental State
The tradition of interpreting China's environmental governance through the lens of the developmental state — a state with significant capacity to mobilise resources, set industrial policy targets, and discipline capital in pursuit of strategic national objectives. This framework emphasises the role of central planning, five-year plan targets, and state investment in structuring the energy transition.
3. Ecological Civilisation
Xi Jinping's signature environmental governance concept, introduced in the 18th Party Congress (2012) and constitutionalised in 2018 — positing that civilisational progress requires harmony between humans and nature. The "ecological civilisation" framework has been used to justify significant central government investment in environmental monitoring, pollution control, renewable energy, and national park systems, while also being used to legitimate top-down governance and restrict grassroots environmental activism.
Key Policy Areas Examined
China's National Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)
Lo and Chen Xiang have published extensively on China's carbon trading market — formally launched as a national scheme in 2021 (though regional pilot schemes operated from 2013). The ETS is the world's largest by coverage (measured in tonnes of CO2), but has been criticised for weak ambition, free allocation of permits, limited price signals, and poor enforcement. The book's analysis examines the ETS as a site of tension between market-based mechanisms and authoritarian state governance — the state using market instruments but retaining control over key parameters.
Central Environmental Inspection Teams
The Central Environmental Inspections — campaign-style enforcement drives launched in 2015–2016 and expanded in subsequent rounds — represent a key example of authoritarian environmentalism in practice. Central inspection teams sent directly from the State Council and Party Central Committee to provinces, with powers to identify and discipline local officials for environmental violations. The Lo-Chen Xiang "AE 2.0" framework uses these teams as a primary example of how authoritarian environmental governance has been updated to combine centralised state power with selective incorporation of public participation.
Green Transformation Discourse
The book engages with the emerging official discourse of "green transformation" in China — the framing of the low-carbon transition as an economic opportunity for industrial upgrading, green manufacturing, and technological leadership. This discourse has been increasingly central to China's Five-Year Plan targets and its international climate diplomacy, representing a shift from environmental governance as constraint management to environmental governance as developmental strategy.
Fragmentation and Governance Gaps
A recurring theme in the scholarship on Chinese environmental governance is the tension between central ambition and local implementation. Despite high-level political commitment and ambitious targets, enforcement at the local level has been historically weak, shaped by local governments' priorities for economic growth, employment, and fiscal revenue. The book provides careful examination of this implementation gap and what it reveals about the structural constraints of authoritarian governance.
The JCA Reviewer's Assessment
Geoffrey C. Chen (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) provides a strongly positive assessment of the book. Key evaluative statements include:
- The book offers "a critical examination of [the] institutionalisation [of China's climate governance] and the structural challenges for China's climate policy over the past decade."
- "A key strength of the book lies in its conceptual framing. The authors place these cases in dialogue with several influential but context-dependent concepts — environmental authoritarianism, the centralised developmental state, and ecological civilisation — using them as analytical lenses rather than fixed labels."
- "Overall, the book provides a careful and comprehensive engagement with both theory and empirical cases in China's climate governance. It offers a balanced and analytically grounded assessment while critically interrogating the effectiveness of policy tools and institutional arrangements."
- "By unpacking the fragmented and domain-specific character of climate governance under authoritarian rule, the book makes a valuable contribution to debates on environmental governance and climate politics in China."
The "Limits of Authoritarian Environmentalism" Argument
The book's central finding — summarised in the JCA review's framing of "the limits of authoritarian environmentalism" — is that China's climate governance has achieved notable results in specific domains (solar and wind energy deployment, electric vehicle manufacturing, emissions intensity reductions, national park system establishment), but these achievements have been uneven, fragmented, and domain-specific rather than systemic.
Even the "AE 2.0" evolution — incorporating market mechanisms and selective participatory elements — retains fundamental limits because the centralising state ultimately absorbs rather than empowers non-state actors, and because authoritarian governance structures generate compliance theatre (reporting targets met, inspection responses managed) that can diverge significantly from actual environmental outcomes.
Significance in the Broader Literature
The book and its JCA review situate within a substantial scholarly debate about whether authoritarian political systems can govern environmental crises effectively. The original "authoritarian environmentalism" literature had a partly prescriptive character — some argued that the urgency of climate change might justify accepting non-democratic governance if it produced effective outcomes. This claim has been increasingly contested, with scholarship showing that:
- China has produced impressive outputs (investment, capacity, regulations) but significant gaps in outcomes (actual emissions reductions remain deeply insufficient for Paris Agreement compatibility)
- The implementation gap between central targets and local practice has been persistent
- The "AE 2.0" evolution represents adaptation rather than resolution of the underlying governance problem
- Xi Jinping's "ecological civilisation" discourse has served both genuine environmental policy functions and legitimation functions that have constrained independent environmental civil society
Book review summary prepared by the IOCSS Journal Monitor. The JCA book review by Geoffrey C. Chen appears in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 56, 2026. The reviewed book by Lo and Chen Xiang is published by Edward Elgar Publishing.