Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-13
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating urgency of climate change has transformed the politics of energy and environmental governance across the world, but nowhere is that transformation more consequential — or more contested — than in China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its fastest-growing producer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China occupies a structurally paradoxical position in the global climate order. The study of China's climate policy, its domestic governance architecture, and the role of market mechanisms in managing a low-carbon transition has therefore become one of the most pressing analytical challenges in contemporary political economy. Against the backdrop of intensifying international climate diplomacy, the post-pandemic reassertion of state industrial policy, and deepening geopolitical rivalries between China and the West, scholarly inquiry into how Beijing designs, implements, and legitimizes its climate governance offers insights that extend well beyond the country's borders.
The central problematic animating recent scholarship on China's climate governance concerns the tension between the ambition of national climate targets and the institutional fragmentation through which those targets must be realized. China's dual carbon goals — peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — represent commitments of extraordinary scope, yet their implementation is mediated through a multi-level administrative system in which provincial governments retain substantial discretionary authority over energy mix, industrial licensing, and local economic planning. The result is a persistent gap between policy declaration at the national level and policy compliance at subnational levels, a phenomenon well documented in the broader literature on Chinese governance. In the climate context, this gap manifests in the continued expansion of coal-fired power capacity in certain provinces even as central directives call for its curtailment, and in the uneven rollout of renewable energy infrastructure across regions with markedly different endowments of political capital and fiscal resources. Understanding how China's central state attempts to discipline, incentivize, and monitor local actors in the service of climate objectives is therefore not merely a question of environmental administration; it is a window into the deeper logic of authoritarian governance and its capacity — or incapacity — to manage structural economic transformation.
Market mechanisms occupy an increasingly prominent role in China's climate governance framework, and their evolution reflects both genuine policy learning and the political constraints under which reform must occur. China's national emissions trading system, formally launched in 2021 and covering the power sector before gradual expansion to other high-emitting industries, represents the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions. Yet the ETS has attracted considerable scholarly and practitioner scrutiny for its design weaknesses: the allocation of carbon allowances has remained largely free of charge, the stringency of caps has been modest relative to the scale of abatement required, and price signals have remained low and volatile in ways that limit investment incentives. These features are not incidental; they reflect the political economy of climate market design in a developmental state where incumbent industries retain significant leverage over regulatory outcomes and where local governments are reluctant to absorb the adjustment costs of rapid decarbonization. The tension between the state's ambition to use market mechanisms as instruments of green industrial policy and the political economy of sectoral resistance thus emerges as a defining dynamic of China's climate transition. Scholarship that takes seriously both the technical design of these instruments and the political conditions of their implementation offers a more complete picture than either technocratic optimism or cynical dismissal alone can provide.
The broader regional and global significance of China's climate policy trajectory extends in several directions that intersect with the concerns of development studies and ODA research. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has financed energy and infrastructure projects across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, has long been criticized for exporting coal-intensive development models to partner countries. The recent articulation of a "Green BRI" agenda and China's commitment to halt overseas coal financing, announced at the United Nations General Assembly in 2021, represents a potentially significant shift in the political economy of Chinese development finance. However, the degree to which this commitment has been operationalized — and whether the greening of BRI reflects genuine policy reorientation or primarily reputational management in the context of heightened global scrutiny — remains a matter of active empirical debate. For recipient countries dependent on Chinese development finance, the trajectory of China's own domestic climate governance carries direct material consequences; a more credible domestic carbon pricing regime and stricter environmental standards for state-owned enterprises could, over time, reshape the terms on which Chinese capital is exported abroad. The analytical linkage between China's internal climate governance reforms and the external developmental footprint of Chinese finance is therefore a productive frontier for interdisciplinary research.
The policy implications of this body of scholarship are consequential for both domestic Chinese reformers and for international actors engaged with China on climate issues. At the domestic level, the evidence suggests that achieving the dual carbon goals will require not only technical refinements to the ETS and accelerated deployment of non-fossil energy, but also deeper institutional reforms that align local government incentives with national climate objectives. Fiscal reform, cadre evaluation systems that genuinely penalize carbon-intensive growth, and greater transparency in environmental data reporting all represent structural prerequisites for effective implementation. At the international level, the analysis cautions against both excessive skepticism and uncritical acceptance of China's climate commitments. The capacity of international engagement — through technology transfer, capacity building, and joint research partnerships — to strengthen the institutional foundations of China's climate governance should not be underestimated, even in a period of heightened geopolitical tension. Multilateral bodies, bilateral aid agencies, and civil society organizations working at the intersection of development and climate would do well to attend carefully to the domestic political economy dynamics through which China's climate policy is actually made, rather than engaging solely with its formal international commitments.
Looking ahead, China's climate policy will remain a subject of intense scholarly and practitioner attention for the foreseeable future, and for reasons that go beyond the country's own emissions trajectory. How China navigates the political economy of green industrial transition — managing labor displacement in coal-dependent regions, restructuring state-owned enterprises in heavy industry, distributing the costs and benefits of decarbonization across social groups and territories — will generate lessons, both cautionary and instructive, for the growing number of developing and middle-income countries seeking to combine climate ambition with continued economic development. The emergence of China as both a major emitter undergoing domestic transition and a major financier shaping development pathways elsewhere creates a distinctive dual agency that complicates easy normative judgments. For researchers and practitioners working on ODA, civil society, and global political economy, the deeper analytical task is to understand China's climate governance not as an exception to general patterns of development politics, but as a variant — large-scale, state-centric, and politically constrained in distinctive ways — of the universal challenge of governing structural economic transformation under conditions of imperfect institutions and competing interests. The scholarship emerging from journals like the Journal of Contemporary Asia that takes this challenge seriously, bringing together political economy, governance analysis, and environmental policy, makes a vital contribution to that collective understanding.