Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-06
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how major emerging economies govern their transition to low-carbon development has become one of the defining challenges of contemporary global political economy. China, as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, occupies an utterly singular position in this landscape. How Beijing designs, implements, and revises its climate governance architecture is not merely a domestic administrative matter — it shapes the trajectory of global emissions, the competitive dynamics of green industries worldwide, and the credibility of multilateral climate commitments under the Paris Agreement framework. A new contribution in the Journal of Contemporary Asia examining China's climate policy through the intersecting lenses of transition, governance, and market mechanisms arrives at a critical juncture: China has formally committed to peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, ambitions that require a fundamental restructuring of an economy historically built on coal, heavy industry, and export-led manufacturing. Understanding how state capacity, market instruments, and governance institutions interact within China's political economy is therefore essential not only for analysts of Chinese affairs but for anyone engaged in the study of development trajectories, ODA architecture, and the global green transition.
The article's framing around the concept of transition is particularly significant because it resists the temptation to treat China's climate trajectory as either a simple technocratic story of energy substitution or a cynical exercise in greenwashing. Transition, in the political economy literature, implies structural change — in industries, labor markets, spatial configurations of production, and crucially in the relationship between state authority and market actors. China's approach to this structural change has been neither purely state-driven nor market-led in the conventional sense but rather reflects what scholars of Chinese political economy have long described as a "market-preserving authoritarianism" or, more recently, a form of developmental state logic adapted to the imperatives of ecological modernization. The central government has deployed a combination of five-year plan targets, regulatory mandates, industrial policy subsidies, and increasingly sophisticated market instruments — most notably the national emissions trading scheme (ETS) launched at scale in 2021 — to simultaneously discipline high-emitting industries and cultivate globally competitive green sectors. The governance challenge lies precisely in holding these logics together: the ETS requires robust price signals and credible enforcement, while industrial policy often rewards scale and speed over efficiency. Examining how these tensions are managed at different levels of the Chinese state — between central ministries, provincial governments, and local implementation agencies — is where the article makes its most substantive analytical contribution.
The governance dimension raises questions that extend well beyond China and connect to broader debates in development studies about the relationship between state capacity and sustainability transitions. For decades, the dominant paradigm in ODA and development finance assumed that market liberalization, transparent regulation, and depoliticized technocratic governance were prerequisites for effective environmental management. China's experience challenges this assumption in several important respects. The speed and scale of China's renewable energy deployment — it now accounts for the majority of global solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing capacity — was achieved through precisely the kind of targeted state intervention that neoliberal development orthodoxy would have viewed with suspicion. At the same time, the persistence of coal consumption, the uneven enforcement of environmental regulations across provinces, and the ongoing tension between growth targets and emissions reduction goals illustrate that state-led transition is no guarantee of coherence or effectiveness. The article's engagement with governance thus contributes to a growing body of comparative political economy research that takes seriously the heterodox forms of institutional arrangement through which large developing states are attempting to reconcile industrialization imperatives with climate commitments — a dynamic that is equally visible, if in different configurations, in India, Brazil, and South Africa.
The market dimension of China's climate governance deserves particular attention from researchers working on civil society and ODA, because it opens questions about who participates in climate governance and whose interests are represented. China's national ETS has been built largely around large state-owned enterprises and major industrial emitters; civil society organizations, community voices, and the non-governmental sector have had limited formal roles in the design or oversight of the scheme. This stands in notable contrast to climate governance experiments in Europe, where civil society participation and judicial review have functioned as important accountability mechanisms. The article's treatment of market mechanisms thus implicitly raises a normative question that ODA practitioners and development scholars must grapple with directly: can market-based climate governance achieve its environmental objectives in the absence of robust civil society engagement, independent monitoring, and rule-of-law accountability? The answer matters not only for evaluating China's domestic trajectory but for assessing the broader model that China is, through its international financial and infrastructure activities under the Belt and Road Initiative, effectively exporting to a significant portion of the developing world. When Chinese policy banks and development finance institutions fund energy projects abroad, they carry with them governance templates shaped by the domestic experience analyzed in this article.
For practitioners and researchers alike, this article's significance lies in its refusal to collapse China's climate governance into either optimistic narratives of green leadership or pessimistic accounts of authoritarian greenwashing. The reality, as the analysis suggests, is considerably more complex and in many ways more instructive. China is conducting a vast, uncontrolled experiment in state-directed ecological transition, and the results — both successes and failures — will provide the empirical material from which the next generation of development theory will be built. For ODA institutions, bilateral donors, and multilateral bodies working on climate finance and just transition programming, the Chinese case offers both cautionary lessons about the limits of top-down governance and genuine insights about the policy instruments through which structural economic transformation at scale can be initiated. As the international community negotiates loss and damage financing, green conditionality in development lending, and the terms of technology transfer from advanced to developing economies, a nuanced understanding of how China's political economy is navigating its own transition is not optional background knowledge — it is essential analytical preparation for engaging with the central development challenges of the coming decade.