Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-25
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's accelerating engagement with climate governance has emerged as one of the defining dynamics in contemporary global political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in international climate politics — simultaneously a source of the problem and an increasingly assertive architect of solutions. The scholarly attention this duality commands is both warranted and overdue. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" enters a rapidly evolving conversation at a particularly consequential moment, when the gap between climate pledges and measurable outcomes is narrowing in some sectors while widening in others, and when the institutional architecture China has constructed to manage this transition is being tested by competing economic, social, and geopolitical pressures. Understanding the mechanisms and contradictions embedded in China's approach is not merely an academic exercise — it has direct bearing on whether the global community can chart a credible pathway toward the emissions reductions that climate science demands.
At the analytical core of work on China's climate transition is the question of governance design. China's approach does not map neatly onto Western liberal models of environmental regulation, where independent regulatory agencies, judicial oversight, and civil society pressure are the primary enforcement mechanisms. Instead, China has pursued what might be described as a developmental-authoritarian model of climate governance, in which the party-state deploys administrative targets, central planning instruments, and selective market mechanisms in an integrated fashion. The carbon emission trading system (ETS), launched nationally in 2021 and now the world's largest by coverage, exemplifies this hybrid character. It borrows the market logic of cap-and-trade from Western precedents but embeds it within a governance architecture where allocation decisions, compliance enforcement, and sectoral scope remain deeply shaped by political imperatives rather than pure economic efficiency. Articles examining this terrain must grapple with whether such instruments represent genuine structural transformation or serve primarily as legitimating signals to international audiences while preserving domestic developmental prerogatives. The tension between these interpretations is not merely theoretical — it conditions how international partners and multilateral institutions calibrate their engagement with Chinese climate commitments.
The transition dimension of China's climate policy intersects critically with the country's broader political economy of industrial restructuring. Decarbonization in China cannot be disaggregated from the simultaneous dynamics of state-led industrial policy, the management of "sunset" industries such as coal and steel, and the strategic promotion of sectors like electric vehicles, solar manufacturing, and battery storage in which Chinese firms have achieved global dominance. These transitions carry profound distributional consequences. Coal-dependent provinces and the communities built around them face trajectories that parallel de-industrialization experiences in Western economies, yet the Chinese state's capacity for directed resource mobilization offers both a buffer and a distinct set of political risks. The governance of this "just transition" — ensuring that the social costs of decarbonization do not fall disproportionately on already-vulnerable workers and regions — remains one of the most underexplored dimensions of Chinese climate policy in the existing literature. Scholarly work that foregrounds market mechanisms alongside governance structures is well positioned to surface how these distributional tensions are being managed, deferred, or suppressed within the Chinese political system.
From a regional and global perspective, China's climate policy choices carry spillover effects that extend well beyond its borders, rendering this topic directly relevant to the concerns of development scholars, ODA practitioners, and analysts of South-South cooperation. China's investments in renewable energy infrastructure across Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Latin America — largely channeled through the Belt and Road Initiative — represent a significant but deeply contested form of climate-relevant development finance. Critics point to the continued financing of coal-fired power plants in partner countries as evidence that China's domestic climate ambitions have not been consistently translated into its external economic engagement. Defenders argue that the trajectory has shifted, with coal financing declining sharply since 2021 and green BRI commitments gaining rhetorical and material traction. Either way, the governance frameworks China deploys domestically will increasingly influence the terms on which it engages developing country partners on energy transition questions — making the domestic analysis inseparable from the international development finance dimension. For civil society organizations and bilateral ODA agencies designing climate programming in regions where Chinese investment is dominant, understanding the internal logic of China's governance model is a practical analytical necessity.
The policy implications of scholarly work in this area extend across multiple registers. For Chinese policymakers, rigorous independent analysis of the gaps between declared climate targets and observed outcomes provides a basis for course correction that internal bureaucratic processes may not readily generate. For international climate negotiators and multilateral institutions, nuanced accounts of the structural constraints and political economy dynamics that shape Chinese policy behavior offer a more productive foundation for dialogue than either uncritical praise or reflexive suspicion. For development practitioners working in third countries, understanding how Chinese climate governance models are being exported — explicitly or implicitly — through infrastructure partnerships, technical assistance, and standard-setting processes is essential to anticipating how local governance environments will evolve. And for the scholarly community itself, the intersection of climate governance, market design, and political economy in the Chinese context represents a genuinely frontier research agenda, one that challenges area studies scholars to engage with comparative political economy and challenges comparativists to take the specificity of Chinese institutions seriously rather than treating them as deviant cases relative to an implicitly Western norm.
Looking forward, several fault lines in China's climate transition will demand close analytical attention. The relationship between the central government's climate ambitions and the behavior of sub-national governments, state-owned enterprises, and local financial institutions remains deeply uneven, and the mechanisms for closing these implementation gaps are still being constructed. The interaction between climate policy and China's macroeconomic pressures — including property sector deleveraging, demographic headwinds, and export-led growth imperatives — will shape how much political capital the state is willing to expend on accelerating decarbonization when it conflicts with near-term growth stabilization. And internationally, as geopolitical competition between China and the United States deepens, the space for constructive climate cooperation is under sustained pressure, even as the physical urgency of coordinated action intensifies. Scholars and practitioners alike must resist the temptation to treat China's climate policy as either a story of unambiguous progress or one of cynical greenwashing; the reality is considerably more textured, and getting the analysis right matters enormously for the collective ability of the international community to respond to climate change at the scale and speed that the science demands.