Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-27
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The urgency of global climate action has brought China to the center of international policy discourse in ways that few other developments could. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, responsible for roughly 30 percent of annual global CO2 output, China's domestic policy choices carry consequences that extend far beyond its borders. The 2020 announcement of dual carbon targets — peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — marked a pivotal moment in global climate diplomacy, signaling that Beijing's leadership had internalized, at least rhetorically, the existential imperatives driving international climate negotiations. Yet the gap between stated commitment and structural transformation remains wide, and it is precisely this gap — between ambition and implementation, between central mandate and local execution, between state governance and market mechanism — that scholarship on China's climate transition must grapple with most rigorously. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, enters this conversation at a critical juncture, offering a framework for understanding how China's climate policy is simultaneously a technical regulatory project, a political governance challenge, and a market-design experiment of historic proportions.
At the analytical core of this work lies a tripartite framework — transition, governance, and market — that captures the multidimensional character of China's climate policy architecture. The energy transition dimension addresses the structural shift away from coal-dominated power generation toward renewables, a shift that China has pursued with remarkable industrial velocity. China now leads the world in installed solar and wind capacity, and its domestic supply chains for clean energy technology have become globally dominant. However, the transition is neither linear nor conflict-free. Coal-dependent provinces, state-owned enterprises with stranded asset exposure, and local governments reliant on carbon-intensive industrial tax bases all represent embedded resistance to decarbonization. The governance dimension captures this tension directly: China's top-down administrative system, while capable of rapid policy mobilization, faces chronic problems of policy fragmentation, principal-agent misalignment between central directives and local implementation, and the persistent challenge of monitoring and enforcement in a geographically vast and institutionally heterogeneous political system. The market dimension, meanwhile, reflects Beijing's strategic choice to complement command-and-control regulation with a national emissions trading scheme — the world's largest by volume of covered emissions — as the primary instrument for achieving cost-effective carbon reduction across key industrial sectors.
The governance dimension deserves particularly close attention because it reveals the structural tensions within China's climate state. China's climate policy is formally coordinated through the National Development and Reform Commission and, since 2018, increasingly through the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, yet implementation authority is substantially delegated to provincial and municipal governments whose incentive structures do not always align with national climate objectives. The history of China's renewable energy policy is instructive here: generous central subsidies produced a spectacular expansion of installed capacity, but grid connectivity failures, local protectionism, and subsidy fraud simultaneously undermined efficiency and fiscal sustainability. The national ETS, launched in its first compliance phase in 2021 and covering the power sector, has similarly encountered challenges of data quality, quota over-allocation, and verification credibility that reflect deeper governance deficits. What the article appears to argue — and what the scholarly literature broadly supports — is that market mechanisms embedded in weak governance environments do not self-correct but instead reproduce the very distortions they were designed to overcome. China's climate governance, in this reading, is not simply a matter of technical design but of political economy: who bears the costs of transition, who captures the rents of climate finance, and whose interests are systematically privileged or marginalized in the process.
The connection to broader regional and global trends in political economy is significant for scholars of development and ODA. China's climate transition is not occurring in isolation but is deeply entangled with its international economic footprint through the Belt and Road Initiative, its role in global clean energy supply chains, and its posture in multilateral climate negotiations. For developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, China's choices have direct implications: Chinese development finance institutions remain major funders of fossil fuel infrastructure abroad even as domestic policy pivots toward decarbonization, creating a policy incoherence that has drawn sustained criticism from civil society organizations and multilateral institutions. At the same time, China's manufacturing dominance in solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles has dramatically reduced the cost of clean energy technologies globally, providing a material foundation for energy transitions in economies that lack China's scale. This duality — simultaneously exporting carbon lock-in through infrastructure finance and enabling decarbonization through technology cost reduction — makes China an indispensable but deeply ambivalent actor in the global climate regime. For ODA scholarship, this raises pointed questions about conditionality, green finance standards, and the degree to which recipient countries can leverage Chinese engagement to advance rather than undermine their own sustainability transitions.
The policy implications of this analysis are substantial and multidirectional. Domestically, China faces the challenge of designing climate governance institutions capable of credibly verifying emissions data, enforcing carbon pricing signals, and managing the political economy of industrial restructuring without triggering the kind of social instability that the party-state is structurally committed to avoiding. The coal phase-down, in particular, requires not merely a regulatory mandate but a comprehensive just transition framework for mining communities, workers, and regional economies — a dimension of China's climate policy that remains underdeveloped relative to the ambition of its headline targets. Internationally, the credibility of China's climate commitments will be judged not only by its domestic trajectory but by its willingness to align its overseas finance with Paris Agreement goals, a pressure that is growing from both developed-country governments and civil society networks. For researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of development studies, climate governance, and Asian political economy, the questions raised by this body of scholarship are likely to define an important strand of inquiry for the coming decade. How China manages the tension between developmental state imperatives and ecological transition imperatives — and whether the governance and market instruments it has chosen prove adequate to the scale of transformation required — will shape not only its own future but the feasibility of global climate stabilization. The answer to that question remains genuinely open, and it is in that openness that the analytic urgency of scholarship such as this resides.