Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-01
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
I'll write the article based on my existing knowledge of China's climate policy, governance, and market mechanisms — this is a well-documented area in political economy scholarship.
The question of how the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter governs its energy transition has emerged as one of the most consequential issues in contemporary global political economy. China accounts for roughly 30 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, and its decisions about industrial restructuring, energy mix, and regulatory architecture will do more to determine the trajectory of global warming than the climate commitments of most other nations combined. Yet for all the attention devoted to China's headline pledges — achieving peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — the internal governance dynamics that will determine whether these targets are met remain poorly understood outside specialist circles. It is precisely this gap that scholarship such as the article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, seeks to address. By situating China's climate policy within the interlocking frameworks of state-led governance, market mechanism design, and the broader dynamics of socialist transition, this body of work offers tools for understanding not merely what China intends to do, but why the institutional architecture it has assembled may succeed or fail in translating political commitment into measurable decarbonization.
The central analytical contribution of this line of scholarship lies in its insistence that China's climate governance cannot be understood through a single lens. The temptation, particularly in Western policy discourse, is to frame China's approach as either a command-and-control story — the party-state mandating emissions reductions through top-down directives — or, alternatively, as a market-based story in which the national emissions trading scheme (ETS) gradually disciplines industrial actors through carbon pricing. The reality, as scholars working in the Journal of Contemporary Asia tradition have consistently argued, is considerably more complex. China's climate governance is better characterized as a hybrid formation in which planning instruments, market mechanisms, and bureaucratic bargaining interact in ways that are often contradictory and always historically specific. The national ETS, launched in 2021 and now the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions, operates within a regulatory environment still dominated by state-owned enterprises and local government interests that have long been entangled with the carbon-intensive industries the scheme is meant to discipline. Understanding this hybrid character is not merely an academic exercise; it is essential for assessing whether market mechanisms transplanted from liberal regulatory contexts will function as designed when embedded in China's distinctive political economy.
The governance dimension of China's climate transition raises issues that resonate deeply across Asia and the developing world. China's approach reflects a broader tension visible in many emerging economies between the imperative to decarbonize and the political economy of industrial development. Local governments in China's rustbelt provinces have historically derived fiscal revenues, employment, and political legitimacy from heavy industry, and their compliance with central climate mandates has been uneven. The well-documented phenomenon of local governments manipulating energy consumption data or timing industrial shutdowns to meet year-end targets without genuine structural change illustrates a principal-agent problem at the heart of China's climate governance. This is not unique to China: similar dynamics appear in India's renewable energy rollout, in Southeast Asian economies navigating coal phase-down commitments, and in resource-dependent African states attempting to integrate climate considerations into development planning. What makes China's case analytically distinctive is the scale at which these tensions operate and the degree to which their resolution — or failure of resolution — will have cascading effects on global carbon budgets. Scholarship that foregrounds governance dynamics rather than treating climate policy as a technocratic exercise in emissions accounting therefore performs an important service for the field.
The market dimension of the analysis connects to significant debates in the political economy of climate change about the limits and possibilities of carbon pricing in non-liberal institutional contexts. The Chinese ETS has been criticized by some analysts for its relatively low carbon price, its allocation of free permits to covered industries, and the concentration of covered sectors in power generation, leaving major emitting industries such as steel and cement outside the scheme's current scope. These design features are not accidents; they reflect the outcome of intense lobbying by state-owned enterprises and the political constraints that central authorities face in imposing costs on strategic industries. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss China's carbon market as merely a greenwashing exercise. The scheme has generated an enormous amount of regulatory learning, has begun to create price signals that affect investment decisions at the margin, and is scheduled to expand its sectoral coverage in ways that would substantially increase its bite. The political economy question is whether the administrative and judicial infrastructure required to enforce compliance can be strengthened faster than industrial incumbents can adapt their strategies to circumvent or dilute the carbon price. Comparative experience from the European Union's ETS suggests that early design weaknesses can be corrected over time, but only when a coalition of political actors with genuine interests in a functioning carbon price achieves sufficient influence within the regulatory process.
For researchers and practitioners engaged with ODA, development finance, and climate governance in the Global South, the Chinese case carries implications that extend well beyond Beijing's own emissions trajectory. China is simultaneously a major recipient of knowledge transfers about carbon market design and a significant exporter of both carbon-intensive infrastructure — through the Belt and Road Initiative — and, increasingly, of renewable energy technology. The governance arrangements China develops domestically will inevitably shape the norms it projects internationally, whether through its participation in multilateral climate negotiations, its bilateral energy partnerships, or the regulatory standards embedded in its overseas investment portfolios. The gradual greening of BRI, while still partial and contested, suggests that domestic governance transformation and international development finance are not separate stories. For development scholars, this means that analysis of China's climate governance is also, necessarily, analysis of the future of development finance and the terms on which low- and middle-income countries will be able to access capital for their own energy transitions. The article under review, by taking seriously the institutional complexity of China's climate governance rather than reducing it to either optimistic narratives of green leadership or dismissive accounts of performative commitment, models the kind of nuanced political economy analysis that this moment demands. As the window for limiting warming to manageable levels continues to narrow, the stakes of getting this analysis right — for practitioners designing climate finance instruments, for researchers modeling emissions pathways, and for policymakers in countries navigating their own transitions — could scarcely be higher.