Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-03
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The urgency of global climate action has placed China at the center of international attention in ways that are simultaneously scientific, diplomatic, and deeply political. As the world's largest emporter of greenhouse gases, China's domestic climate governance choices carry consequences that extend well beyond its own borders, shaping the trajectory of international climate negotiations, the competitiveness of global clean energy industries, and the credibility of multilateral climate commitments under the Paris Agreement framework. Yet China's approach to climate policy remains frequently misunderstood in Western policy discourse, often reduced to binary narratives of either a reluctant laggard or an emergent green superpower. The article under discussion, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses this complexity directly by examining China's climate policy through the interlocking lenses of transition, governance, and market — a tripartite framework that offers a more nuanced and structurally grounded account of how climate imperatives are being translated into institutional realities within the Chinese political economy.
At the heart of the article's analytical contribution is the question of how China is managing what might be called a "dual transition" — simultaneously decarbonizing its energy system while sustaining the developmental imperatives that have defined its economic model for decades. China's 2020 pledge to achieve peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, colloquially known as the "dual carbon" or "3060" goals, represents a significant political commitment, but the governance architecture required to deliver on these targets remains a site of ongoing contestation and institutional construction. The article likely draws attention to the tensions inherent in this process: between central planning and market mechanisms, between short-term growth incentives at the local level and long-term national decarbonization targets, and between China's domestic political economy and its international climate diplomacy. These are not merely technical challenges of policy design but reflect deep structural features of the Chinese state and its developmental trajectory.
The role of market-based instruments in China's climate governance is particularly instructive in this regard. China launched its national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2021, creating what is formally the world's largest carbon market by coverage. However, as observers of comparative climate policy have noted, the effectiveness of carbon pricing as a decarbonization tool depends critically on the institutional depth and political independence of the regulatory framework surrounding it. In China's case, the carbon market operates within a governance environment characterized by strong party-state coordination, significant information asymmetries between central regulators and local implementing actors, and an energy sector dominated by state-owned enterprises whose interests are deeply embedded in the existing carbon-intensive economy. The article's engagement with "market" as an analytical category thus invites reflection not simply on whether market mechanisms are present, but on what kind of market is being constructed, under what political conditions, and in whose interests. This question connects to broader debates in the political economy of climate governance about the limits of market-based approaches when deployed in the absence of robust regulatory institutions or in contexts where state-capital relations undermine price discovery and compliance.
China's climate governance also sits at a critical intersection with its foreign policy ambitions and its role in the global South. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has exported significant quantities of coal-fired power infrastructure to developing countries, a practice that has drawn criticism from climate advocates and complicated China's self-presentation as a responsible climate actor. Yet more recent years have seen a notable, if uneven, shift in this pattern, with Chinese financiers and construction firms increasingly active in renewable energy projects across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. For scholars of ODA and development finance, this trajectory raises important questions about the conditions under which Chinese overseas energy finance is becoming "greener," whether this shift reflects genuine normative change, commercial incentives driven by the falling cost of renewables, or reputational pressure from host-country civil society and international environmental standards. The article's focus on transition and governance thus has implications not only for understanding China's domestic policy but for how China's climate posture reshapes the development finance landscape in which other international actors — bilateral donors, multilateral development banks, and civil society organizations — must operate.
Looking forward, the analytical framework offered by this research carries significant implications for both policy practitioners and area studies scholars. For policymakers engaged in climate diplomacy, understanding the internal governance constraints on China's climate commitments is essential for calibrating expectations and designing productive forms of international cooperation. Agreements that ignore the political economy of implementation — the local government incentive structures, the state-enterprise relationships, the capacity gaps in monitoring and enforcement — risk overstating what Chinese commitments can deliver in practice. For development scholars and civil society researchers, the article underscores the importance of attending to the specific institutional configurations through which global climate norms are domesticated in large emerging economies. China is not simply a recipient of international climate governance norms but an active shaper of them, and its choices about what blend of transition, governance, and market mechanisms to deploy will influence the template available to other major developing economies navigating their own green transitions. As the global climate negotiating agenda continues to evolve, particularly in the aftermath of COP30, analytical work that takes seriously the political economy of climate governance in China — rather than treating it as an opaque monolith — will be indispensable for researchers and practitioners alike who seek to understand where the real leverage points for decarbonization lie.