Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-12
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how large authoritarian states govern their energy transitions has become one of the defining puzzles of contemporary political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its fastest-growing producer of renewable energy, China occupies an anomalous and consequential position in global climate politics. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" enters this analytical terrain at a moment of exceptional urgency. With COP30 approaching in Belém, with the United States having retreated from multilateral climate commitments under the Trump administration's second term, and with the Global South increasingly looking to Beijing as a credible standard-bearer for green industrial development, the scholarly scrutiny of how China actually governs its climate transition — not merely how it performs that governance in diplomatic forums — has never been more necessary. The article's intervention is therefore timely and substantively important, addressing three interlocking dimensions: the pace and coherence of China's low-carbon transition, the institutional architectures through which climate governance is exercised, and the role of market mechanisms, particularly carbon pricing, in mediating the relationship between the state and industry.
At the core of the article's analytical framework is a recognition that China's climate policy cannot be understood through the lens of any single paradigm. The governing logic of Beijing's approach to decarbonization reflects what scholars at the LSE Grantham Research Institute have described as a tripartite structure: green authoritarianism as the political model, green state-steering as the central-local-private organizational dynamic, and green economic planning as the medium-term programmatic container. What distinguishes the Journal of Contemporary Asia article is presumably its willingness to hold these dimensions in tension rather than resolving them prematurely into an optimistic or pessimistic narrative. China has, by any objective measure, built the world's largest renewable energy system and the most complete new energy industrial chain. Non-fossil electricity accounted for nearly 40 percent of total power generation by 2024, and wind and solar made up more than 82 percent of newly installed capacity in that year. These are not marginal achievements. Yet the same government that celebrates these figures has consistently subordinated explicit climate goals to growth imperatives, as evidenced by Premier Li Qiang's March 2025 government work report, in which "accelerating the green transition" appeared only as a secondary theme behind consumption stimulus, AI deployment, and manufacturing upgrading. The article's analytical value lies in taking both sides of this contradiction seriously.
The governance dimensions of China's climate transition present perhaps the richest terrain for scholarly analysis, and this is where the Journal of Contemporary Asia piece makes its most significant contribution to the literature. The central challenge is what analysts have termed the "implementation gap" — the persistent divergence between centrally articulated climate mandates and subnational practice. Local governments in China face structural incentives that continue to favor growth over decarbonization. Declining fiscal revenues, particularly in inland and resource-dependent provinces, create pressure to maintain coal-fired power and carbon-intensive industry even as central directives push in the opposite direction. Xi Jinping's ultra-concentration of political authority has paradoxically produced a fragmented governance landscape in which provincial authorities exercise considerable discretion in interpreting and implementing climate regulations, sometimes gaming compliance metrics through what analysts describe as "low-quality peaking" — formally meeting peak-emissions targets while leaving the structural conditions for continued high-carbon activity unchanged. The National Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), launched as a mandatory compliance mechanism for the power sector in 2021 and subsequently expanded to cover steel, cement, and aluminum from 2025, represents Beijing's primary market-based instrument for managing this governance challenge. However, the ETS operates on an intensity-based benchmarking methodology rather than an absolute cap, meaning that total emissions can continue to rise as long as emissions per unit of output decline — a design choice that reflects the political constraints under which the system operates as much as any technical rationale. Progress Report data for the National ETS in 2025 shows a cumulative trading volume of 637 million tonnes of carbon allowances with a composite closing price of approximately 69 yuan per tonne, figures that indicate growing market liquidity but carbon prices that remain far below the levels economists associate with meaningful decarbonization incentives.
The article's significance extends well beyond the domestic Chinese policy arena and connects directly to some of the most consequential debates in international development and political economy. As traditional Western donors retreat from ambitious climate finance commitments — in part due to the political realignment represented by the Trump administration's hostility to multilateralism — China's position as both an emitter and a financier of green development has become structurally more important. China alone accounted for 69 percent of all climate finance flowing to emerging and developing countries between 2018 and 2022. The China International Development Cooperation Agency has continued to promote what it describes as "small and beautiful" green projects across the Global South, while in 2025 a China-UN Global South-South Development Facility was established with explicit mandates for green and resilient development. Beijing has also signed Memoranda of Understanding with 55 countries on green development cooperation and is actively using its domestic green finance standards and carbon market experience as a template for South-South regulatory diplomacy. This means that the institutional choices made within China's domestic climate governance — the design of the ETS, the robustness of MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification) systems, the willingness to move toward absolute emissions caps — have direct consequences for the quality and credibility of climate finance and technology transfer that China exports globally. A China whose domestic carbon market lacks credibility cannot credibly position itself as the custodian of a fair and effective global climate governance architecture.
For researchers and practitioners in the fields of ODA policy, civil society studies, and comparative political economy, the article's implications are simultaneously sobering and generative. The Chinese model of climate governance — centralized political authority combined with strategic deployment of market instruments and a constrained but non-trivial role for technical expertise — is not merely a domestic experiment. It is an increasingly visible alternative to the liberal-democratic paradigm of deliberative consensus-building and decentralized enforcement, and it is proving attractive to a range of middle-income and lower-income states seeking to accelerate their own green transitions without the procedural demands associated with Western aid architectures. This presents a genuine normative challenge for international development institutions and civil society organizations that have built their climate programming around assumptions of participatory governance, stakeholder consultation, and transparent accountability. The evidence from China's own experience suggests that these procedural commitments, while normatively important, have sometimes been weaponized to delay rather than accelerate decarbonization, and that technocratic environmentalism — even in its authoritarian variant — can deliver measurable outcomes at scale. At the same time, the social costs of China's green transition, including the displacement of communities dependent on coal-sector employment, the coercive implementation of energy efficiency mandates without adequate social protection, and the repression of environmental civil society that might otherwise provide accountability and local knowledge, represent genuine developmental deficits that the international community cannot afford to treat as acceptable collateral damage. Looking forward, the most productive research agenda is likely one that resists both uncritical celebration of China's green industrial achievements and reflexive dismissal of its governance model, and that instead asks the harder question of which elements of China's approach — its long-term planning horizon, its capacity to mobilize finance at scale, its willingness to coordinate across sectoral ministries — can be extracted from their authoritarian political context and adapted to governance environments where popular legitimacy and civil participation remain non-negotiable conditions for durable policy success.