Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-02
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating pace of climate change has transformed environmental governance from a peripheral concern into a central axis of global political economy. No country occupies a more consequential position in this transformation than China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure. As the international community navigates the post-Paris Agreement landscape and the widening gap between nationally determined contributions and the trajectories required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the internal dynamics of China's climate policymaking have become a subject of urgent scholarly and practical interest. An article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a moment when the intersecting pressures of geopolitical competition, developmental imperatives, and ecological crisis are reshaping the Chinese state's relationship to both its domestic economy and its international partners. Understanding how China is structuring its response to these pressures — and the institutional architecture through which that response is articulated — is therefore essential not only for climate science but for the broader study of developmental states, global governance, and the future of multilateral cooperation.
The conceptual triad embedded in the article's title — transition, governance, and market — maps directly onto three of the most contested terrains in contemporary political economy scholarship on China. The question of transition points beyond mere energy-system change toward a deeper transformation of the developmental model that has sustained China's rise since the reform era. China's carbon peak and neutrality commitments, targeting 2030 and 2060 respectively, are not simply technical engineering problems; they represent a structural reorientation of an economy built on energy-intensive manufacturing, coal-dependent power generation, and investment-led growth. The literature on developmental states has long emphasized the capacity of state institutions to coordinate sectoral transformation, and China's experience offers a compelling if complex case. The article engages with how central planning instruments, industrial policy, and administrative targets are being deployed to steer this transition, while simultaneously grappling with the coordination failures and local implementation gaps that have historically undermined top-down environmental mandates in China's fragmented governance system.
On the question of governance, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that interrogates the distinctive features of China's environmental regulatory architecture. The consolidation of climate functions under the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the integration of climate targets into the Five-Year Plan framework, and the elevation of the dual carbon goals to a matter of national strategic priority all reflect a centralizing impulse within Xi Jinping's administrative program. Yet the relationship between central directives and subnational compliance remains deeply uneven. Provincial governments, historically rewarded for GDP growth rather than environmental performance, face acute tensions between economic development objectives and decarbonization mandates. The article's treatment of governance therefore necessarily engages with questions of bureaucratic incentive structures, inter-agency coordination, and the political economy of local government debt — factors that significantly shape the real-world implementation of climate policy across China's heterogeneous regional landscape. This analysis resonates with broader comparative governance literature on the implementation gap in authoritarian developmental states, where formal policy ambition frequently outpaces institutional capacity.
The market dimension of the article engages with China's national Emissions Trading Scheme, launched in 2021 as the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions, and the broader suite of market-based instruments being integrated into China's climate governance toolkit. The design and performance of China's ETS has drawn significant international scrutiny, particularly regarding allowance allocation methodologies, price discovery mechanisms, and the credibility of underlying emissions data. The article situates these technical debates within a broader political economy framework, examining how market instruments interact with, and are frequently subordinated to, the administrative planning mechanisms that remain the primary levers of Chinese economic governance. This tension between market-based and command-based approaches to decarbonization is not unique to China — it reflects a global debate about the appropriate role of carbon pricing relative to regulatory standards and public investment — but it takes on particular salience in a political system where market mechanisms are understood as instruments of state strategy rather than autonomous allocative processes. The article's contribution to this debate is to ground theoretical frameworks in empirical analysis of how Chinese market institutions are actually functioning, rather than how they are formally designed to function.
The implications of this analysis extend well beyond China's borders and carry significant relevance for practitioners working in the fields of official development assistance, South-South cooperation, and climate finance. China's Belt and Road Initiative has been a major vehicle for energy infrastructure financing across the Global South, and the ongoing greening of BRI — reflected in the 2021 commitment to cease overseas coal financing — represents a significant, if incomplete, reorientation of Chinese development finance toward lower-carbon pathways. For recipient countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the nature of China's domestic climate transition shapes the technologies, financing terms, and governance models that Chinese development actors are able and willing to export. Development practitioners and ODA researchers must therefore attend carefully to the internal dynamics of Chinese climate governance, since these dynamics directly influence the parameters of China's external engagement. The article's analysis of governance fragmentation and market instrument design within China thus has direct downstream implications for the quality and coherence of climate-related development cooperation flowing through Chinese channels.
Looking forward, the research presented in this article raises questions that will only grow in urgency over the coming decade. The credibility of China's 2060 carbon neutrality pledge hinges not only on technological deployment — where China's performance in solar, wind, and battery manufacturing has already exceeded many projections — but on the deeper institutional and political economy transformations that would be required to eliminate residual coal dependency and restructure heavy industry. The article's framework of transition, governance, and market provides a useful analytical scaffold for monitoring these developments, and for situating them within comparative and global perspectives. For scholars of Asian political economy, the case of China's climate governance offers a rich site for examining how developmental state capacities are being adapted, tested, and sometimes strained by the demands of ecological transformation. For practitioners engaged in climate diplomacy, development finance, and civil society advocacy, the article serves as a reminder that the distance between formal commitment and institutional reality is where the most consequential analytical and political work remains to be done.