Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-28
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's emergence as both the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and one of its most ambitious clean energy investors has placed its climate governance at the center of global debates about decarbonization, political economy, and the future of multilateral climate cooperation. As the international community navigates the uneven terrain between the Paris Agreement commitments and the escalating urgency of climate science, the choices made in Beijing carry consequences far beyond national borders. Understanding how China constructs, implements, and revises its climate policy framework is therefore not merely a matter of academic interest — it is a prerequisite for any serious analysis of whether global temperature targets remain achievable. A recent contribution in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, examining China's climate policy through the intersecting lenses of transition, governance, and market, offers a timely and analytically rigorous entry point for this inquiry.
At the heart of any serious examination of China's climate trajectory lies the tension between the country's developmental imperatives and its increasingly prominent international climate commitments. China's dual carbon goals — peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 — represent a dramatic recalibration of the relationship between economic growth and environmental constraint. What makes China's case particularly compelling for scholars of political economy is that this transition is not being driven primarily by civil society pressure or electoral politics in the Western liberal democratic sense, but rather through a distinctive form of state-led market governance. The Chinese Communist Party has positioned climate transition as a strategic priority intertwined with national security, technological leadership, and industrial competitiveness, which fundamentally shapes the instruments and institutions through which climate policy is designed and executed. This article's framing around governance and market mechanisms foregrounds precisely these dynamics, asking how the Chinese state orchestrates market actors toward decarbonization ends while simultaneously managing the social and economic dislocations that energy transition inevitably produces.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy is particularly complex because it operates across multiple and sometimes competing levels of authority. Central directives issued through national development plans and sectoral regulations must be translated into action by provincial and municipal governments that have historically prioritized GDP growth in their performance evaluations. The gradual incorporation of environmental and carbon metrics into local governance assessments represents one of the most significant institutional shifts in recent years, yet implementation gaps remain substantial. Provincial governments in coal-dependent regions face structural dilemmas that no amount of top-down direction can easily resolve — the livelihoods of millions of workers, the fiscal health of local governments, and the energy security of industrial supply chains all converge in ways that resist simple technocratic solutions. The article's attention to governance therefore captures something essential: that climate transition in China is as much a problem of political economy and institutional design as it is of technological deployment or financial mobilization.
China's carbon market, launched nationally in 2021 after years of regional pilot programs, represents the most visible expression of the effort to harness market mechanisms in the service of state-directed decarbonization. As the world's largest emissions trading scheme by coverage, its architecture and performance carry significant implications for the global carbon market landscape. Yet analysts have noted persistent concerns about allowance over-allocation, data integrity, and the limited price signal generated in its early phases — all of which speak to the inherent difficulties of grafting market logic onto a political economy structured around state enterprise dominance and negotiated regulatory outcomes. The journal article's engagement with market governance thus connects to a broader scholarly debate about the extent to which carbon pricing instruments designed in Western regulatory contexts can be adapted to Chinese institutional conditions without losing their theoretical rationale. The answer, as much empirical work has suggested, is likely to involve a distinctive hybrid form — neither a purely market-based mechanism nor a purely command-and-control system, but an evolving institutional experiment shaped by Chinese governance norms.
Connecting these domestic dynamics to the broader regional and global ODA and development landscape reveals additional layers of significance. China's green finance initiatives, including the Belt and Road Initiative's stated pivot toward low-carbon infrastructure, have generated substantial debate among recipient countries, donor organizations, and civil society actors about conditionality, transparency, and long-term debt sustainability. If China's domestic climate governance succeeds in demonstrating that large developing economies can achieve credible low-carbon transitions without sacrificing growth, it may offer a model — or at least a reference point — for other emerging economies navigating similar dilemmas. Conversely, if the governance deficits and market limitations documented in the domestic experience are replicated in overseas investments, the developmental and environmental outcomes for partner countries could be deeply problematic. Scholars of ODA and global political economy therefore have strong reasons to track Chinese climate governance not only as a national case study but as an increasingly consequential variable in the international development system.
The policy implications that flow from this body of analysis are substantial for both researchers and practitioners. International climate negotiators and development finance institutions need to engage seriously with the institutional specificities of China's climate governance rather than treating it as a legible variant of familiar OECD regulatory models. Civil society organizations working on climate accountability in China and in countries receiving Chinese green finance must develop analytical capacities attuned to the particular forms of transparency and contestation available within the Chinese political system. For academic researchers, the article underscores the continuing value of area-studies depth in a field increasingly dominated by large-N comparative work — the mechanisms through which climate policy is formulated, negotiated, and implemented in China are not easily visible from aggregate data alone.
Looking forward, the period between now and China's self-declared carbon peak represents perhaps the most consequential decade in the country's environmental history. The trajectory of coal phase-down, the pace of renewable energy integration, the effectiveness of the carbon market as a price-discovery and abatement incentive mechanism, and the political durability of climate commitments under conditions of global economic uncertainty will all be determined in large part by governance choices that are being made now. Scholars working at the intersection of Chinese politics, environmental governance, and global political economy are therefore operating at a moment of genuine analytical and practical urgency. Contributions like the one under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia — grounded in institutional detail, attentive to market-state dynamics, and sensitive to the multiple scales at which Chinese climate governance operates — are precisely the kind of work the field needs to produce if research is to remain meaningfully connected to the decisions that will shape the planet's climate future.