Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-08
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating pace of climate change has transformed it from an environmental concern into a defining axis of geopolitical competition, economic restructuring, and governance experimentation. Nowhere is this transformation more consequential — or more contested — than in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure. As the international community grapples with the widening gap between climate commitments and actual emissions trajectories, understanding how China navigates the internal tensions of its climate transition has become one of the most pressing questions in contemporary political economy. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages precisely this terrain, situating China's climate policy at the intersection of state governance, market mechanisms, and the structural imperatives of a transitioning developmental state.
China's approach to climate governance reflects a distinctive logic that defies simple categorization within familiar liberal or authoritarian frameworks. The Chinese state has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to mobilize capital, industrial policy, and administrative authority in the service of green transition goals — solar photovoltaics, wind energy, and electric vehicle manufacturing have all been propelled to global dominance through a combination of subsidies, preferential financing, and coordinated supply chain development. Yet this capacity coexists with profound contradictions. Coal consumption has repeatedly defied official targets; local governments, whose fiscal health often depends on carbon-intensive industries, have systematically resisted central mandates; and the energy security concerns sharpened by post-COVID supply disruptions and geopolitical friction have repeatedly subordinated climate ambitions to short-term stability imperatives. The article's engagement with these tensions — between central aspiration and local implementation, between market signals and administrative command — captures something essential about the governance architecture through which China's transition is being attempted.
The role of market mechanisms in China's climate policy deserves particular analytical attention. China launched its national emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2021, creating nominally the world's largest carbon market by volume. However, the scheme's actual regulatory bite has remained limited, with carbon prices persistently low and coverage initially restricted to the power sector. The relationship between market design and political economy is revealing here: the ETS reflects a genuine ambition to harness price signals for decarbonization, but the market's architecture has been carefully constrained to avoid disrupting incumbent energy incumbents and to preserve state influence over allocation decisions. This dynamic — deploying market instruments while retaining administrative authority over their parameters — is characteristic of what scholars have termed China's "market-Leninist" developmental model. The article's attention to this governance hybrid illuminates why China's climate transition cannot be adequately analyzed through either a purely state-centric or market-centric lens, but requires a political economy framework attentive to the specific institutional configurations through which the two are articulated.
From a broader regional and international development perspective, China's climate trajectory carries implications far beyond its borders. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has financed energy infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, has increasingly become a terrain of contestation between coal-based and renewable investment. The shift in Chinese policy banks and state enterprises toward greener BRI financing — accelerated by international pressure, reputational concerns, and evolving domestic priorities — represents a meaningful if incomplete reorientation of China's overseas development footprint. For recipient countries, particularly those with high dependence on Chinese ODA and infrastructure finance, China's domestic climate governance choices ripple outward, shaping the energy pathways available for their own development. The analytical framework developed in the article — emphasizing the contingent, contested, and politically mediated character of China's transition — is therefore not merely relevant to China specialists but carries direct implications for development scholars and practitioners working across the Global South.
For researchers and policymakers, the article's significance lies in part in its methodological contribution: resisting the temptation to treat China's climate governance as either a unified state project or as a simple market failure, and instead illuminating the multi-scalar, multi-actor character of the transition process. Local governments, state-owned enterprises, private firms, central regulators, and international interlocutors all operate with partially divergent interests and incentives, and the outcomes of China's climate policy are produced through the ongoing negotiation among these actors rather than from any single decision-making center. This insight has practical consequences for international climate diplomacy. Engagement strategies premised on treating China as a monolithic interlocutor are likely to misread both the leverage points and the genuine constraints that shape Chinese behavior in multilateral climate forums.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by several converging pressures: the domestic political economy of just transition for coal-dependent regions and workers; the competitive dynamics of green industrial policy as the United States, European Union, and China contest leadership in clean energy supply chains; and the evolving architecture of international climate finance as developing countries push for greater ambition on loss and damage, adaptation, and technology transfer. China's position in all of these arenas is simultaneously that of a major emitter seeking regulatory flexibility, a green technology exporter with strong commercial interests in global market expansion, and a developing country narrative that continues to inform its negotiating posture. Scholars and practitioners who can hold these multiple registers simultaneously — as the article under review demonstrates — will be best positioned to generate analysis that is genuinely useful for navigating the complex decades ahead.