Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-22
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate change and political economy has emerged as one of the defining analytical challenges of the twenty-first century, and nowhere is this tension more consequential than in China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of its most ambitious investors in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate governance. The country's trajectory over the coming decades will substantially determine whether international climate commitments remain credible or collapse under the weight of geopolitical fragmentation and domestic economic priorities. Within this context, scholarly attention to the internal governance mechanisms and market architectures shaping China's climate transition represents not merely an academic exercise but an urgent contribution to understanding how the global political economy of decarbonization will unfold. The article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia offers a timely entry into these debates, engaging the three interconnected dimensions of transition, governance, and market that together constitute the structural logic of China's evolving climate posture.
At the core of any serious analysis of China's climate policy is the tension between the state's developmental imperatives and its increasingly prominent international commitments. China's dual carbon goals — peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 — represent a structural commitment of remarkable ambition, one that necessarily implicates the entire architecture of Chinese industrial policy, energy finance, and regional governance. The analytical contribution of work situated in the Journal of Contemporary Asia tradition lies in its capacity to read these policy commitments not simply as diplomatic declarations but as sites of governance contestation and institutional reordering. Transitions of this scale are never merely technical; they involve the redistribution of economic rents, the reorganization of bureaucratic authority, and the recalibration of relationships between central and subnational governments. In the Chinese context, where provincial governments retain significant economic autonomy while remaining formally subordinate to central directives, the governance dimension of climate transition carries particular analytical weight. Provincial coal-dependent economies face starkly different incentive structures than coastal manufacturing hubs, and the capacity of central authorities to enforce consistent climate standards across this heterogeneous landscape remains one of the more contested empirical questions in contemporary China studies.
The market dimension of China's climate policy is equally complex, and scholarship that foregrounds this axis makes a genuine contribution to comparative political economy. China's national carbon emissions trading system, formally launched in 2021 and currently covering the power sector, represents the world's largest carbon market by volume of covered emissions. Yet its design features — including a relative intensity-based benchmark rather than an absolute cap, limited price discovery mechanisms, and ongoing debates over market liquidity — reflect the distinctly Chinese hybrid of market instruments and state administrative control. This is not a simple story of market liberalization displacing command-and-control regulation; rather, it illustrates the emergence of what some scholars have termed "market-embedded statism," in which price signals are deployed strategically within a governance framework that retains strong state discretion over outcomes. The analytical implication is significant: carbon markets in China cannot be evaluated using the same normative frameworks applied to cap-and-trade systems in the European Union or California, because the underlying political economy of price formation and compliance enforcement operates according to different institutional logics. Scholarship that takes this seriously, rather than applying Western policy templates wholesale, contributes meaningfully to a more genuinely comparative climate governance literature.
Connecting these dynamics to broader regional and global trends in official development assistance and political economy reveals additional layers of significance. China's overseas energy finance, channeled primarily through the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China under the Belt and Road Initiative framework, has undergone a visible shift in recent years, with publicly announced coal financing declining sharply following the 2021 pledge to cease building new coal-fired power plants abroad. This international dimension of China's climate transition is inseparable from its domestic governance dynamics: the same bureaucratic actors, financial institutions, and industrial policy instruments that shape the domestic carbon transition also govern China's external energy footprint. For recipient countries in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, this reorientation of Chinese development finance carries profound implications for their own energy transitions, development pathways, and sovereign choices about infrastructure investment. The ODA community has grappled for decades with questions of conditionality and policy coherence; the rise of China as a major development finance actor adds a new layer of complexity, particularly as Chinese institutions themselves navigate the transition from fossil-fuel-intensive to renewable-oriented project portfolios. Scholars working at the intersection of development studies and comparative political economy are well-positioned to illuminate these dynamics, and the Journal of Contemporary Asia provides a natural disciplinary home for such work.
The policy implications of rigorous scholarly engagement with China's climate governance are substantial and extend well beyond China's borders. For multilateral climate institutions, understanding the internal governance constraints and market design choices shaping Chinese implementation is essential for calibrating realistic expectations about what international climate diplomacy can accomplish. The gap between nationally determined contributions and domestic policy implementation has been a persistent challenge across all major emitters, and China is no exception; but the specific mechanisms through which this gap manifests — subnational compliance variation, data integrity challenges in emissions accounting, the political economy of energy-sector state-owned enterprises — require sustained empirical attention rather than assumption-laden generalization. For civil society organizations and development practitioners engaged in climate-related programming across Asia, the governance dimension is equally salient: understanding which institutional actors within the Chinese state are driving climate ambition, which are resisting it, and how subnational experimentation shapes policy diffusion can inform more effective advocacy strategies and partnership approaches. Scholarship that maps these internal dynamics with analytical precision is a genuine resource for practitioners navigating complex political environments.
Looking forward, the questions raised by China's climate transition will only grow in significance as the 2030 emissions peak target approaches and the more technically and politically demanding task of post-peak decarbonization begins. The governance arrangements and market architectures being constructed today will either enable or constrain that deeper transition, and the choices being made now — about carbon market design, green finance taxonomy, clean energy industrial policy, and the political management of fossil fuel dependency in interior provinces — will have path-dependent consequences for decades. Researchers and practitioners alike would benefit from sustained comparative attention to how China's experience relates to other major transition economies navigating similar tensions between developmental ambition and climate commitment. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article under review contributes to this ongoing conversation by holding together the three analytical registers of transition, governance, and market, resisting the temptation to reduce China's climate policy to any single explanatory framework. As the global political economy of decarbonization continues to evolve under conditions of geopolitical uncertainty, this kind of theoretically informed, empirically grounded scholarship will remain indispensable for anyone seeking to understand not just what China is doing on climate, but why, and with what consequences for the broader international order.