Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-07
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's climate policy has emerged as one of the most consequential variables in global environmental governance, and its evolution over the past decade reflects deep tensions between state-led developmental ambitions, market-oriented reform agendas, and international normative pressures. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the second-largest economy, China occupies a structurally unique position in the global climate order: simultaneously a developing country asserting its right to emissions space and a great power whose choices define the ceiling of what global decarbonization can realistically achieve. The publication of this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when that dual identity is being tested in new ways — by domestic economic headwinds, by geopolitical friction with Western climate partners, and by the mounting pressure of a carbon budget that leaves little room for delay. Scholarly attention to how China navigates the intersection of political transition, governance architecture, and market mechanisms is therefore not merely of academic interest; it is a precondition for understanding whether the Paris Agreement's temperature targets remain within reach.
The conceptual framing of this article — organized around the triad of transition, governance, and market — is analytically productive because it resists the temptation to reduce China's climate trajectory to a single explanatory logic. Much of the existing literature has oscillated between techno-optimistic narratives celebrating China's renewable energy deployment and critical political economy accounts emphasizing the continued dominance of coal-aligned industrial interests. By triangulating across transition dynamics, governance structures, and market instruments, the article is better positioned to capture the layered and at times contradictory character of Chinese climate policymaking. The "transition" dimension necessarily engages with China's energy system evolution — the extraordinary scaling of solar and wind capacity, the reconfiguration of the State Grid, and the still-unresolved question of coal phase-down timelines in provinces where thermal power underwrites both employment and fiscal revenues. The governance dimension forces attention to the multi-level structure of the Chinese state, where national carbon intensity targets are translated imperfectly through provincial implementation, and where local governments retain substantial discretion to prioritize growth metrics over emissions compliance. The market dimension speaks most directly to China's national emissions trading scheme (ETS), launched formally in 2021, which has expanded to cover the power sector and is scheduled to incorporate additional high-emission industries in subsequent phases.
These three dimensions intersect in ways that reveal the distinctiveness of China's climate governance model relative to both liberal market economies and other developing country contexts. In OECD countries, carbon pricing has typically been introduced through parliamentary legislation or regulatory rulemaking in contexts where civil society organizations, business associations, and international investors exert meaningful countervailing pressure on the state. China's ETS, by contrast, was designed and implemented primarily through executive authority, with limited participatory input and a trading architecture that has been criticized for insufficient price signal credibility. This is not simply a deficit of democratic accountability — it reflects a broader governance philosophy in which the party-state retains strategic control over the pace and direction of structural transformation, using market instruments instrumentally rather than ceding regulatory authority to price signals. Understanding this distinction matters for ODA practitioners and development partners who may otherwise misread the transferability of European carbon market models to the Chinese institutional context.
From a regional political economy perspective, China's climate policy choices cast a long shadow over East and Southeast Asia. Chinese overseas energy financing, coordinated through policy banks and state-owned enterprises operating under the Belt and Road Initiative, has historically channeled substantial capital into coal-fired power infrastructure across Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and several African economies. The greening of this overseas financing footprint — evidenced by President Xi's 2021 pledge to cease building new overseas coal projects — represents a significant inflection, though monitoring and enforcement mechanisms remain underdeveloped. Recipient countries now face a complex landscape in which Chinese development finance is shifting toward renewables while domestic grid infrastructure and regulatory capacity lag behind the implied transition demands. This creates a new layer of ODA relevance: how do bilateral and multilateral development actors design complementary support for countries whose energy trajectories have been deeply conditioned by Chinese capital, and who must now manage transition risks that were in part externally generated?
The policy implications of this article's analytical framework extend beyond China itself. For researchers working on comparative climate governance, the Chinese case problematizes the conventional assumption that effective carbon pricing requires institutionally embedded civil society participation and transparent regulatory processes. China's command-and-incentive hybrid model may produce significant emissions reductions — or it may generate compliance gaming and data credibility problems that erode confidence in reported progress. The international community's ability to assess which trajectory is occurring depends on advances in independent emissions monitoring, satellite-based verification, and third-party auditing that are themselves politically contested. For development practitioners, the article raises the urgent question of whether China's governance model is being exported alongside its capital — whether recipient country governments are absorbing not only Chinese infrastructure but Chinese regulatory philosophies that concentrate climate authority in executive agencies and minimize public accountability mechanisms. This is a question with direct bearing on the effectiveness of ODA in the climate space, where co-financing arrangements with Chinese institutions are increasingly common and where governance conditionality frameworks developed in a Washington Consensus context may require significant adaptation.
Looking ahead, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by factors that are in part endogenous to its political economy — the outcome of factional contests over industrial policy, the fiscal pressures constraining provincial compliance capacity, the credibility of carbon market price signals as more sectors are incorporated — and in part exogenous, including the evolution of trade-related climate measures such as the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the degree to which US-China climate diplomacy revives or fragments. For researchers and practitioners at institutions like IOCSS engaged with the political economy of development cooperation, the most pressing research frontier is perhaps the interface between China's domestic climate governance reforms and its external development finance architecture. Whether China's internal transition generates positive spillovers for its development partners, or whether governance deficits at home are replicated in low- and middle-income country contexts, remains an open and consequential empirical question. The analytical vocabulary offered by this article — transition, governance, market — provides a useful scaffold for that broader inquiry, and for the kind of comparative, region-sensitive scholarship that the Journal of Contemporary Asia is well positioned to advance.