Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-05-31
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's approach to climate governance represents one of the most consequential policy experiments of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest installer of renewable energy capacity, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate politics that defies easy categorization. The country's trajectory matters not only for the physics of planetary warming but for the institutional architecture of international climate cooperation, the terms on which developing nations engage with decarbonization imperatives, and the future of state-led industrial transformation in a multipolar world. Scholarship that examines the intersection of transition, governance, and market dynamics in China's climate policy therefore addresses questions of urgent analytical and practical importance — questions that resist the simplified framings that often dominate Western commentary and that demand sustained, empirically grounded engagement with Chinese political economy on its own terms.
Any serious analysis of China's climate policy must begin with the recognition that it cannot be disentangled from the broader project of economic and political governance that the Chinese Communist Party has pursued with increasing deliberateness since the early 2000s. Climate commitments — including the landmark pledge to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 and peak emissions before 2030, announced at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020 — are not simply responses to international normative pressure, though that pressure is real and has shaped the timing and form of Chinese announcements. Rather, they are embedded within a domestic logic that links ecological modernization to industrial upgrading, energy security, and the long-term legitimacy of Party rule. The concept of "ecological civilization," enshrined in the Chinese Constitution in 2018, provides an ideological framework that legitimizes state intervention in markets, justifies coercive environmental enforcement, and projects an image of responsible great-power stewardship. Understanding China's climate governance therefore requires holding together two analytical lenses simultaneously: the international pressures that create incentives for climate commitment, and the domestic political economy that shapes how those commitments are translated into policy instruments and institutional arrangements.
The governance dimension of China's climate transition is particularly revealing. Unlike liberal democratic systems where climate policy must be assembled through legislative coalition-building and is vulnerable to electoral reversal, China's authoritarian political structure enables top-down policy mandates of considerable scope and speed. This has produced genuine achievements: the extraordinary scaling of solar photovoltaic manufacturing, wind energy deployment, and electric vehicle production represents a form of state-directed industrial policy whose effectiveness no serious analyst can dismiss. Yet the same governance architecture generates characteristic pathologies. Local governments, whose officials face performance metrics that have historically privileged GDP growth over environmental outcomes, have repeatedly found ways to delay, circumvent, or formally comply while substantively undermining central mandates. The enforcement of coal phase-down targets, for instance, has encountered systematic resistance from provincial authorities whose fiscal bases and employment profiles remain deeply dependent on fossil fuel industries. The chronic gap between central policy ambition and local implementation fidelity is not a technical failure but a structural feature of Chinese governance that shapes what the energy transition can realistically achieve and at what pace.
The market dimension introduces a further layer of complexity. China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021, represents the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions and embodies a particular theory of change: that price signals, mediated through state-designed market mechanisms, can drive decarbonization more efficiently than command-and-control regulation alone. Yet the scheme's early performance has been mixed in ways that illuminate broader tensions in China's political economy. Initial coverage was limited to the power sector, and the generous allocation of free permits constrained price signals sufficiently that many analysts questioned whether the carbon price was high enough to alter investment decisions at the margin. More fundamentally, the coexistence of a carbon market with extensive state planning, administered energy prices, and state-owned enterprise dominance in key sectors creates an institutional hybrid whose dynamics differ substantially from the market-liberal models on which carbon pricing theory was originally developed. This hybridity is not simply a transitional imperfection to be resolved as markets mature; it reflects deep choices about the relationship between state authority and market mechanism that are unlikely to be resolved through convergence with Western institutional norms.
From a political economy perspective, the article's engagement with transition, governance, and market as an integrated triad points toward a more sophisticated comparative framework than is often deployed in climate policy discourse. The energy transition in China is not merely a technical substitution of one fuel source for another but a politically managed restructuring of productive relationships, regional economic geographies, and state-capital configurations. The rise of Chinese solar and battery manufacturers as globally dominant firms has occurred through a combination of state subsidies, protected domestic markets, and the cultivation of manufacturing scale that has dramatically reduced global technology costs — with profound implications for climate finance debates about who bears the costs of global decarbonization. If cheap Chinese technology has lowered the material cost of the energy transition globally, questions about intellectual property, market access, trade policy, and the politics of green industrial competition have become inseparable from climate diplomacy in ways that existing international frameworks are poorly equipped to manage.
For practitioners and researchers working at the intersection of development assistance, climate finance, and South-South cooperation, China's climate governance evolution carries significant implications. Chinese climate finance through multilateral mechanisms and bilateral infrastructure investment continues to exhibit a profile that differs from OECD Development Assistance Committee norms — with heavier emphasis on loans over grants, energy infrastructure over policy reform, and project-level conditionality over systemic governance requirements. As the international community attempts to scale up climate finance for developing countries in the wake of COP28 commitments, understanding how Chinese approaches interact with, complement, or complicate multilateral climate finance architecture will be essential. The governance lessons embedded in China's own transition experience — including both the enabling conditions that have made rapid deployment possible and the structural obstacles that continue to slow the coal phase-down — offer a body of evidence that developing countries seeking to manage their own energy transitions will study carefully and selectively appropriate. Scholarship that analyzes these dynamics with empirical precision and theoretical depth, situating China's climate policy within the broader landscape of political economy and global governance, makes a contribution that extends well beyond area studies to the central analytical challenges of the climate era.