Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-23
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating urgency of climate change has repositioned environmental governance from a peripheral concern of international relations to a central axis around which geopolitical alignments, development finance, and domestic political economies are increasingly organized. Within this landscape, no actor commands more analytical attention than China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical but pivotal place in the global climate order. Its choices about how to govern the energy transition — through what institutional mechanisms, under what market logics, and toward what developmental ends — carry consequences that extend well beyond its borders, shaping the trajectory of international climate diplomacy, green finance, and the political feasibility of low-carbon transitions in the developing world. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," intervenes in this consequential debate by examining how China's internal governance architectures and market instruments are being reshaped in response to both domestic imperatives and external pressures, offering a nuanced account that resists both uncritical celebration and reflexive skepticism.
At the core of the article's analytical contribution is the recognition that China's climate governance cannot be adequately understood through the lens of a unitary, centrally directed state acting on a coherent and stable set of preferences. The Chinese state is not monolithic, and the politics of climate governance reflect deep tensions between central ambitions and local implementation, between the developmental imperatives of provincial governments reliant on carbon-intensive industries and the green modernization agenda promoted by central planners and technocratic elites. The rollout of China's national emissions trading scheme — the world's largest carbon market by coverage — exemplifies these tensions. Launched with considerable fanfare as a market-based instrument for achieving carbon neutrality commitments, the scheme has faced persistent challenges around data integrity, price discovery, and the political economy of permit allocation, all of which speak to the difficulty of embedding market rationality within a governance system structured around administrative command and negotiated compliance. The article's engagement with the governance dimension of the transition — rather than focusing narrowly on renewable energy capacity additions — therefore provides a more analytically honest accounting of where China actually stands in its decarbonization trajectory.
The article's framing of "transition" as a contested and multidimensional process resonates strongly with broader scholarly debates in the political economy of energy systems. Transitions are not simply technical substitutions of one energy source for another; they involve the reordering of power relations, the redistribution of economic rents, the displacement of incumbent industries and their associated labor forces, and the emergence of new coalitions with interests in the shape and pace of change. In China, this translates into the gradual but uneven decline of the coal sector, the spectacular rise of solar and wind industries that have become globally competitive through a combination of state support and learning-curve dynamics, and the concurrent struggle to manage the social and political consequences of industrial restructuring in coal-dependent interior provinces. Connecting this domestic political economy to regional and global dynamics, one must note that China's climate transition has significant implications for developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have received Chinese overseas financing for energy infrastructure. The gradual reorientation of Chinese development finance toward greener projects — reflected in the 2021 commitment by President Xi Jinping to cease financing overseas coal plants — marks a potentially significant shift in the ODA landscape, though questions remain about the depth, pace, and conditionality of this reorientation and whether it will be matched by commensurate increases in financing for renewable energy in recipient countries.
From a policy standpoint, the article's examination of the interplay between governance and market in China's climate framework carries implications not only for Chinese domestic policy but for the international architecture of climate finance and low-carbon development. The effectiveness of China's carbon market, and the integrity of the governance systems underpinning it, matters for the emerging global conversation about carbon border adjustment mechanisms and the conditions under which different national carbon pricing systems might be considered comparable for purposes of trade policy. The European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, now entering its transitional phase, will increasingly scrutinize the credibility of carbon pricing regimes in major trading partners. China's governance capacity — its ability to enforce meaningful carbon pricing rather than nominal compliance — will therefore become an increasingly salient variable in Sino-European trade and climate relations. For practitioners in the development finance community, the article's findings suggest that support for institutional capacity building around emissions monitoring, verification, and carbon market governance in China and in Chinese-financed projects elsewhere may be as valuable as direct support for renewable energy deployment.
Looking forward, the analytical framework offered by this article opens several productive avenues for research and practice. The relationship between market instruments and state capacity in climate governance is not a settled one even in the most institutionally advanced economies, and China's experience provides a large-scale natural experiment with significant global relevance. Researchers and practitioners should watch closely how China's regulatory agencies develop the technical and administrative capacity to underpin a credible national carbon market, and whether the lessons from this experience are transferable to other major emitters in the Global South contemplating similar instruments. There is also the broader question of how China's climate governance evolution interacts with the political economy of its Belt and Road Initiative and its ambitions as a provider of development finance. As the global community intensifies pressure on development finance institutions to align portfolios with the Paris Agreement, China's posture — both domestically and as an international investor — will be central to whether a genuinely just and ambitious global energy transition is achievable. Scholars working at the intersection of political economy, development studies, and climate governance will find in this article a valuable reference point for grappling with one of the defining governance challenges of the twenty-first century.