Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-11
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate change, state governance, and market formation has emerged as one of the defining axes of global political economy in the twenty-first century. Nowhere is this intersection more consequential — or more contested — than in the People's Republic of China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in international climate politics. Its commitments under the Paris Agreement — to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 — represent arguably the most significant single-country pledge in the history of multilateral environmental governance. Yet the domestic institutional architecture required to deliver on these pledges remains deeply uneven, layered with legacies of developmental statism, fragmented bureaucratic authority, and market mechanisms that are still in their formative stages. The article under examination in the Journal of Contemporary Asia intervenes in this debate at a moment of growing urgency, offering a framework for understanding how China's climate policy operates simultaneously as a governance project, a market-construction exercise, and a political-economic transition with ramifications well beyond the country's borders.
The core analytical contribution of the article revolves around the concept of transition — not merely as a technical process of shifting energy systems, but as a politically structured transformation of the relationships between state authority, market actors, and sub-national governance. China's climate governance is not monolithic. The central government sets headline targets and strategic directions through instruments such as the Five-Year Plans and the national carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) launched nationally in 2021, but implementation is heavily mediated through provincial and local governments whose incentives frequently diverge from central mandates. This governance fragmentation has been well documented in the broader literature on Chinese environmental regulation, but the article's contribution lies in situating it within a specifically climate-political framework. The tension between national decarbonization ambitions and local developmental imperatives — particularly in coal-dependent inland provinces — represents not simply an administrative coordination problem but a structural feature of China's authoritarian developmentalist model as it attempts to pivot toward ecological civilization. The article thus engages with a fundamental question: can the same state apparatus that organized one of history's most rapid industrial expansions now organize an equally rapid industrial contraction in carbon-intensive sectors?
Market mechanisms occupy a central place in Beijing's climate governance toolkit, and the article's treatment of the national ETS is particularly instructive for scholars of comparative environmental policy. China's carbon market, covering the power sector and representing the largest cap-and-trade system in the world by volume of covered emissions, was designed to harness price signals to incentivize decarbonization without relying solely on command-and-control regulation. Yet early evidence from the market's operation reveals significant limitations: initial benchmarking methodologies allowed many covered enterprises to receive allowances exceeding their actual emissions, free allocations dominated over auctioning, and carbon prices remained low relative to abatement costs, undermining the market's incentive function. These design features reflect deliberate political compromises rather than technical failures alone — the priority accorded to industrial stability and employment in the early phase of the ETS reflects the same developmental logic that has shaped Chinese environmental governance for decades. The article's analysis of this market-governance nexus contributes to a broader theoretical conversation about the conditions under which market instruments can be effectively embedded in statist developmental contexts, a question of direct relevance to other large middle-income countries considering similar approaches.
The broader regional and global implications of China's climate policy trajectory deserve sustained analytical attention. Within Asia, China's choices carry profound structural weight. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese state-owned enterprises and policy banks have historically financed significant coal-fired power generation across South and Southeast Asia, contributing to carbon lock-in effects in economies that will bear disproportionate climate burdens. The announced greening of the BRI — through frameworks like the Green Investment Principles and revisions to the overseas lending guidelines of major policy banks — represents a potentially significant shift, though the gap between policy commitment and on-the-ground project selection remains substantial. Scholars of ODA and development finance will find the article's implicit engagement with this dynamic particularly relevant: China's climate finance posture affects not only bilateral relations but the competitive incentive structures facing other major donors operating in the same regions, including traditional OECD-DAC members. If China does succeed in repositioning itself as a green development finance provider, the implications for civil society organizations engaged in environmental advocacy across the Global South will be significant and not straightforwardly positive, given the different accountability norms and consultation standards that typically accompany Chinese-financed projects relative to multilateral development bank lending.
From a policy research standpoint, the article makes a valuable contribution by resisting both the techno-optimist framing that dominates much Western commentary on China's renewable energy boom and the dismissive skepticism that treats Chinese climate commitments as purely rhetorical. The reality is considerably more complex: China is simultaneously a genuine leader in solar photovoltaic manufacturing and deployment, a country still approving new coal power plants at a scale that alarms climate scientists, and a state in the midst of a genuine — if contested and uneven — governance transition around carbon. For practitioners engaged in climate diplomacy, development cooperation, or civil society capacity building, this complexity demands analytical frameworks capable of holding contradictions in productive tension rather than resolving them prematurely. The article's situating of climate policy within China's broader political economy offers precisely this kind of nuanced purchase. Looking forward, the questions it raises will only intensify as China approaches its 2030 emissions peak deadline and as the architecture of post-Paris climate governance comes under increasing pressure. Whether China's hybrid model of climate governance — combining central planning, market mechanisms, and selective international engagement — proves replicable or cautionary for other developing economies will be one of the most consequential empirical questions in global environmental politics over the decade ahead.