Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-24
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China governs its energy transition sits at the intersection of the most consequential political, economic, and ecological challenges of our era. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases — responsible for approximately 28 percent of global annual CO2 emissions — China's choices about decarbonization carry implications that extend far beyond its own borders. When President Xi Jinping announced in September 2020 that China would peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the pledge reverberated through international climate diplomacy, financial markets, and development policy circles alike. The article "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, enters this charged terrain by interrogating not merely the ambition of China's climate commitments, but the institutional architecture through which those commitments are being translated — or not translated — into practice. This is precisely where the most consequential uncertainties lie, and where rigorous scholarly analysis is most needed.
The central problematic animating the article concerns the relationship between state authority and market mechanisms in China's low-carbon transition. China's climate governance is often discussed in monolithic terms — a centralized party-state dictating decarbonization from above — but the reality is considerably more textured. China's National Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), launched in its national form in 2021 and now the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions, currently encompasses over 3,300 firms in the power, steel, cement, and aluminum sectors. Yet the architecture of this system reveals deep tensions. Allowances remain 100 percent freely allocated using an output-based approach, which blunts the price signal that carbon markets are theoretically designed to send. The scheme operates on an intensity-based rather than absolute cap basis, meaning that total emissions can still rise even as carbon efficiency improves. The August 2025 policy directive from the General Office of the CPC Central Committee signaling a roadmap toward an absolute cap and expanded sectoral coverage represents a significant acknowledgment that the current design is insufficient — but also that the state has been calibrating market instruments cautiously, wary of the economic disruptions that abrupt carbon pricing could entail. The article situates these design choices within the broader logic of Chinese policy sequencing: gradualism not as timidity, but as a deliberate strategy for managing politically sensitive industrial transformations.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy is equally rich with analytical complexity. Recent scholarship has challenged the dominant narrative of a uniformly state-led transition by demonstrating that divergent governance structures have emerged at the subnational level. Two broad models have been identified: a centralized developmental state model, in which provincial and local governments operate as transmission belts for central mandates; and a more distributed governance structure, in which a broader range of actors — including private firms, local innovators, and community stakeholders — shape transition pathways. This subnational variation is analytically significant because it complicates any straightforward assessment of China's overall trajectory. The 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans set binding targets for energy intensity reduction, non-fossil fuel share, and carbon intensity, and national ministries exercise formal oversight; but implementation is highly contingent on local political economies, fiscal incentives, and administrative capacities. The persistent "implementation gap" — whereby ambitious central mandates are diluted, deferred, or selectively honored at the local level — has been a chronic feature of Chinese environmental governance, and the article implicitly raises the question of whether the newly strengthened monitoring and verification frameworks are adequate to close it.
The broader scholarly literature on what has been termed "authoritarian environmentalism" provides an important analytical context for the article's intervention. Scholars such as Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro have argued that China's ecological civilization discourse, rather than representing a genuine paradigm shift toward sustainability, frequently functions as a legitimating framework for the extension of party-state authority over populations, territories, and global commons. Under this reading, green policy is as much about regime durability as it is about ecological outcomes. The market mechanisms introduced through the ETS and related instruments add a further layer of complexity: market logics are selectively deployed where they serve state developmental objectives, but are constrained or overridden when they threaten politically preferred industries or social stability. The tension between what one analyst has called "party-state capitalism" in fossil energy phase-out and the professed role of market mechanisms in driving the transition is not merely rhetorical — it has direct implications for the credibility and effectiveness of China's carbon pricing architecture. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's focus on political economy makes it a particularly apt venue for interrogating these contradictions.
At the level of international and comparative policy, the stakes of China's climate governance model are substantial. China's head start in solar, wind, and electric vehicle manufacturing means that other nations' energy transitions are, to a considerable degree, materially dependent on Chinese industrial capacity. This creates a paradox for development financing and ODA practice: international development institutions promoting clean energy transitions in the Global South increasingly find themselves navigating supply chains and financing structures in which Chinese state-owned enterprises occupy central positions. The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), against which China has lodged formal WTO objections while simultaneously accelerating its own ETS, illustrates how domestic climate governance has become inseparable from geoeconomic competition. For development practitioners and researchers working in Asia and beyond, understanding the specific institutional logics of China's market-governance hybrid — rather than treating it as either a technocratic success story or a legitimacy-laundering exercise — is an analytical precondition for meaningful engagement.
Looking forward, several questions raised by the article demand sustained attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The planned expansion of China's ETS to additional industrial sectors, combined with the shift toward absolute caps, will test the party-state's capacity to enforce meaningful carbon constraints on politically connected industries. The coexistence of centralized and distributed governance models at the subnational level raises the possibility of productive experimentation, but also of regulatory fragmentation and competitive dynamics between provinces that undermine system-wide coherence. Perhaps most importantly, the question of whether China's model of state-directed, market-inflected climate governance offers a transferable template for other developing economies — or whether it is deeply conditioned by China's specific political economy, administrative capacity, and geopolitical position — remains genuinely open. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's contribution, by grounding the analysis in the specific institutional configurations of Chinese climate governance rather than abstract ideal types, advances the kind of contextually grounded comparative scholarship that this moment urgently requires. For an international research community grappling with the uneven, contested, and politically fraught character of global decarbonization, work of this kind is not merely academically valuable — it is practically indispensable.