Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-09
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's approach to climate governance has emerged as one of the most consequential and contested dimensions of contemporary global political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest investor in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical but pivotal position in the international climate order. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," arrives at a moment when scholars and policymakers alike are grappling with fundamental questions about how authoritarian developmental states manage the contradictions inherent in pursuing rapid decarbonization without sacrificing growth, employment, or political stability. These questions have direct implications not only for China's domestic trajectory but for the broader prospects of climate multilateralism, green finance flows, and the political economy of development assistance across Asia and beyond.
The central analytical concern of this scholarship lies in interrogating the mechanisms through which China's climate governance has evolved — moving from a framework largely defined by administrative fiat and top-down target-setting under the Hu Jintao-era energy intensity reduction campaigns toward an increasingly market-inflected architecture under Xi Jinping. The national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), launched in its compliance phase in 2021 and continuously expanded thereafter, represents the most visible institutional expression of this shift. Yet as scholars of Chinese political economy have consistently cautioned, the presence of market instruments does not straightforwardly imply the marketization of governance. China's carbon market has been designed from the outset to operate within a framework of strong state oversight, with price corridors, sectoral coverage decisions, and allocation methodologies all determined by central authorities rather than emerging organically from competitive dynamics. The article's contribution, situated within the Journal of Contemporary Asia's long tradition of critical political economy, appears to offer a nuanced reading of this hybrid governance form — one that resists both the celebratory accounts of China as a green superpower and the dismissive narratives that reduce its climate commitments to performative diplomacy.
What makes this analysis particularly significant is its engagement with the concept of "transition" not as a linear trajectory toward a predetermined green endpoint but as a contested, uneven, and politically mediated process. China's domestic climate transition involves the management of enormous socioeconomic dislocations: coal-dependent provinces in the northeast and inland regions face structural unemployment, stranded assets, and fiscal stress as the energy system reorients toward wind, solar, and hydropower. The governance challenge is not merely technical but deeply distributional — who bears the costs of transition, how are losers compensated, and what institutional arrangements mediate between central climate mandates and local economic imperatives. In this sense, China's experience resonates with debates in development studies and comparative political economy about the conditions under which states can successfully coordinate just transitions, particularly in contexts where fiscal federalism, local government financing vehicles, and cadre incentive structures create powerful path dependencies favoring incumbent energy regimes. The article's attention to these multi-scalar governance tensions situates it within a wider scholarly conversation about the political foundations of sustainability transitions in large, heterogeneous, middle-income states.
From the perspective of Official Development Assistance and global civil society, China's climate governance trajectory carries significant externalities that extend well beyond its borders. China's overseas energy finance, channeled primarily through the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, has historically been concentrated in fossil fuel infrastructure across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America — a pattern that has drawn sustained criticism from climate advocates and complicated China's international climate diplomacy. However, there are credible indications of a policy reorientation in this domain. President Xi's 2021 pledge to halt new public financing for overseas coal projects represented a significant symbolic commitment, and subsequent years have seen a measurable shift in Chinese development finance toward renewable energy, grid infrastructure, and green industrial capacity in partner countries. For researchers studying development finance and ODA effectiveness, this shift raises important questions about conditionality, transparency, and the degree to which Chinese green finance replicates or diverges from the standards and practices associated with OECD-DAC donors and multilateral development banks. The Journal of Contemporary Asia piece, with its focus on governance and market mechanisms, provides a conceptual vocabulary for engaging these questions analytically rather than polemically.
The policy implications of this scholarship are substantial and multilayered. For policymakers within partner countries seeking to engage China's growing green finance apparatus, understanding the internal governance logic of China's climate policy — its blend of administrative capacity, market instruments, and state-directed industrial policy — is essential for negotiating terms, managing expectations, and embedding adequate safeguards into bilateral agreements. For multilateral climate institutions, China's hybrid model complicates the standard toolkit of governance reform recommendations premised on liberal market principles, suggesting the need for a more pluralist approach to evaluating institutional design adequacy. For civil society organizations working on climate justice, extractivism, and community rights in countries that receive significant Chinese investment, the article's attention to the tensions between market mechanisms and state authority offers a framework for identifying leverage points within the Chinese system — understanding, for instance, which regulatory bodies have genuine authority over environmental compliance standards in overseas projects and which commitments exist primarily at the level of diplomatic declaration.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy governance will be shaped by at least three intersecting dynamics that researchers and practitioners should monitor closely. First, the ongoing expansion and deepening of the national ETS — with plans to extend coverage to steel, cement, chemicals, and other heavy industries beyond the current power sector perimeter — will test whether China's carbon market can generate the price signals necessary to drive genuine abatement investment at the firm level, or whether political pressures to protect industrial competitiveness will continue to result in over-allocation and suppressed prices. Second, the geopolitical context of climate policy is evolving rapidly, with the fraying of multilateral climate cooperation under renewed great power competition creating pressures on China to define its climate identity in ways that serve both domestic legitimacy and international positioning. Third, the intersection of China's climate governance with its broader industrial policy agenda — particularly the extraordinary global expansion of its electric vehicle, battery, and solar manufacturing sectors — raises fundamental questions about the relationship between climate mitigation, industrial competition, and trade politics that will shape the contours of the green economy for decades to come. Scholarship that, like the article under consideration, takes seriously the specificity of China's governance arrangements while connecting them to global structural dynamics will be indispensable for navigating these complex and consequential developments.