Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-30
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating pace of climate change has fundamentally restructured the terrain of global governance, compelling major powers to reposition their domestic and international strategies in ways that carry profound consequences for the wider international order. Among these actors, China occupies a singular and often contradictory position: simultaneously the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure. Understanding how China is navigating the intersection of climate ambition, state governance, and market mechanisms is therefore not merely an academic exercise but a matter of urgent geopolitical and developmental significance. As multilateral climate frameworks face mounting pressure from the retreating commitments of Western industrialized nations and as developing countries grapple with the asymmetric burdens of decarbonization, the trajectory of China's climate policy offers critical lessons and warnings for scholars, policymakers, and civil society practitioners alike.
The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia enters this conversation by situating China's climate policy within the overlapping frameworks of political transition, governance restructuring, and market-based regulatory mechanisms. The central analytical contribution lies in moving beyond the conventional binary — China as either a green leader or a recalcitrant polluter — to examine the internal institutional dynamics that shape climate policymaking in the Chinese context. China's governance architecture is not a monolithic command structure but rather an ensemble of competing bureaucratic interests, regional governments with heterogeneous economic endowments, state-owned enterprises resistant to rapid decarbonization, and an emerging private clean energy sector with its own set of incentives and dependencies. The tension between these actors generates policy outcomes that are frequently inconsistent, unevenly implemented, and subject to periodic reversals, even as the central government issues ambitious headline commitments such as the dual carbon goals — peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. The article's treatment of this governance complexity is its most analytically valuable dimension, as it resists both uncritical celebration and reflexive dismissal of China's climate record.
A particularly important dimension of China's climate transition is the role of market mechanisms, most notably the national emissions trading scheme (ETS) launched in 2021 and now the world's largest by coverage of total emissions. The design and performance of this market instrument reflects the broader tensions embedded in Chinese climate governance. On one hand, the ETS represents a significant institutional commitment to using price signals rather than purely administrative mandates to drive decarbonization, aligning China partially with the market-liberal logic that has dominated international climate finance discourse. On the other hand, the scheme has been criticized for its lenient benchmarks, limited sectoral scope, and the vulnerability of carbon price formation to political interference and data integrity problems. These characteristics are not incidental but structural: they reflect the political economy of a developmental state that must balance environmental objectives against employment stability, industrial competitiveness, and the fiscal interests of carbon-intensive provinces whose revenue bases remain deeply tied to coal and heavy industry. This internal contradiction between market rhetoric and administrative priority is a recurring motif in China's climate governance and raises important comparative questions about the transferability of market-based climate instruments to non-liberal political economies.
Situating this analysis within the broader landscape of official development assistance and global climate finance reveals further layers of complexity. China is simultaneously a domestic climate actor, a major provider of development finance through institutions like the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, and an increasingly active participant in multilateral climate diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, which for much of the past decade served as a vehicle for coal-intensive infrastructure exports, has in recent years undergone a rhetorical and partial operational greening, with Chinese officials pledging to cease financing overseas coal power plants and to expand green BRI lending. Whether this reorientation represents a genuine strategic shift or primarily a response to reputational pressures from recipient countries, civil society organizations, and multilateral partners remains a subject of active scholarly debate. For researchers working in the ODA and development finance space, China's evolving posture matters enormously because its financing decisions shape the energy infrastructure lock-in trajectories of dozens of developing economies, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where the choice between fossil-fuel and renewable energy pathways will define carbon profiles for decades to come.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond the China studies field and carry direct relevance for international climate negotiations, multilateral development institutions, and civil society organizations engaged in climate advocacy and accountability work. If China's domestic climate governance is as fragmented, contested, and subject to implementation gaps as the article suggests, then external actors — whether bilateral partners, international financial institutions, or transnational advocacy networks — must calibrate their engagement strategies accordingly. Simplified narratives that treat China's state as a unified rational actor capable of executing centrally determined climate commitments with consistency underestimate the degree to which subnational political economies, sectoral lobbies, and bureaucratic rivalries shape actual outcomes on the ground. At the same time, frameworks that dismiss China's climate commitments as purely performative ignore the real and expanding deployment of solar, wind, electric vehicles, and battery storage that has reshaped global clean energy supply chains and driven down technology costs worldwide. For researchers at institutions like IOCSS, this complexity calls for methodological pluralism — combining political economy analysis, institutional ethnography, and comparative policy analysis — rather than reliance on aggregate emissions data or official policy pronouncements alone. The future of global climate governance will be substantially determined by whether China's internal transition accelerates, stalls, or is redirected by the pressures of geopolitical competition, domestic economic stress, and the mounting physical impacts of climate change itself, making sustained scholarly attention to these dynamics not only academically rewarding but practically indispensable.