Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-05
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
I'll draw on my substantive knowledge of this topic to write the article.
The question of how China governs its energy and climate transition sits at the intersection of some of the most consequential dynamics in contemporary global affairs. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China occupies a structurally paradoxical position in the international climate order. The country is both the principal source of the problem and, by several measures, the engine of the solution. Scholarly attention to China's climate policy has intensified accordingly, yet the literature has often bifurcated into two inadequate camps: one that uncritically celebrates China's renewable energy expansion as evidence of green developmental state capacity, and another that dismisses climate commitments as rhetorical cover for continued fossil fuel investment. A more analytically precise engagement with the governance architecture, market mechanisms, and political economic logic underpinning China's climate trajectory is therefore urgently needed — and that is precisely the intellectual contribution that work appearing in journals such as the Journal of Contemporary Asia increasingly provides.
China's dual climate pledges — peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, announced at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020 — represent the most ambitious national climate commitments ever made by a developing country in absolute terms. These goals, however, did not emerge from a vacuum. They reflect a convergence of overlapping imperatives: geopolitical repositioning in the post-Trump multilateral order, domestic air quality imperatives linked to social stability concerns, industrial policy ambitions in clean technology sectors, and genuine scientific and technocratic recognition within the Chinese state apparatus that climate risk poses a long-term threat to economic stability. Disentangling these motivations is critical because each suggests a different theory of policy durability and a different set of vulnerabilities. If climate ambition is primarily geopolitical, it is contingent on international dynamics and susceptible to reversal when the diplomatic calculus shifts. If it is rooted in industrial policy, it is more durable but skewed toward deployment rather than systemic emissions reduction. Understanding which logic dominates — and how they interact across different policy domains — is precisely the kind of question that rigorous political economy analysis must address.
The governance architecture China has constructed to deliver on these commitments is neither purely market-based nor straightforwardly statist. At the apex sits a central state with extraordinary formal authority over energy investment, land use, and industrial planning. Yet the delivery of climate targets operates through a multi-level system in which provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, and increasingly a complex ecosystem of private clean-tech firms each play pivotal roles with distinct incentive structures. The national Emissions Trading Scheme, launched in February 2021 and covering the power sector, represents a landmark institutional development — China's ETS is now the world's largest by volume of covered emissions. But its early operational years revealed the tensions inherent in market-based climate governance within a party-state system: allowances were initially allocated with considerable generosity to avoid economic disruption, price signals remained weak, and enforcement varied significantly across regions. The market exists, but it is a politically constructed and continuously managed market, not an autonomous price-discovery mechanism. This is not a failure of implementation so much as a reflection of the underlying political economy: the Chinese state seeks decarbonization without destabilization, and the ETS is calibrated accordingly.
These dynamics connect to broader patterns in the comparative political economy of climate governance in emerging economies. China's experience echoes, in amplified form, the dilemmas faced by other large developing states navigating the tension between developmental aspirations and decarbonization imperatives. The classical developmental state literature, from Johnson to Weiss, emphasized the state's capacity to pick industrial winners and coordinate long-term investment — capabilities that are genuinely present in China's green industrial policy. But climate governance also requires the state to simultaneously manage losers: coal regions, heavy industry, and the vast employment ecosystems they sustain. China's approach has been to pursue parallel tracks — accelerating clean energy deployment while managing the decline of fossil fuel sectors through gradual phase-down rather than rapid retirement, a strategy that contains political risk but extends the period of dual-track emissions. For ODA practitioners and development finance institutions, China's trajectory offers a critical reference point: the conditions under which market mechanisms can function as complements rather than substitutes for strong state coordination, and the institutional prerequisites for making an ETS credible in a context of significant political economy constraints.
Looking forward, several dynamics will be decisive for China's climate trajectory and for the scholarly frameworks used to analyze it. The expansion of the national ETS to cover additional sectors — steel, cement, chemicals, and aviation are under consideration — will test whether the instrument can operate with sufficient rigor when the affected industries carry greater political weight than the power sector. The trajectory of China's overseas energy finance, particularly through Belt and Road Initiative instruments, will also bear closely on the credibility of its green transition narrative: the announced shift away from overseas coal finance represents a significant commitment, but its implementation remains contested and partially opaque. At the level of governance scholarship, there is a pressing need for fine-grained subnational analysis that captures the heterogeneity of provincial climate policy performance, and for comparative work that situates China's institutional choices within the wider universe of state-market configurations for climate governance. For researchers at institutes concerned with civil society and political economy, the question of how non-state actors — domestic environmental NGOs, international climate finance institutions, industry associations — shape and are shaped by the governance architecture around China's transition offers a particularly rich agenda. The stakes of getting this analysis right extend well beyond China's borders: in a world where global temperature outcomes depend disproportionately on the decisions made in Beijing, the quality of our scholarly understanding of Chinese climate governance is itself a matter of planetary consequence.