Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-14
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
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The question of how major emerging economies govern their climate transitions has become one of the defining challenges of twenty-first-century political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets, China occupies a singular position in global climate politics. Its policy trajectory carries consequences that extend far beyond its own borders, shaping international carbon markets, global supply chains for green technology, and the credibility of multilateral climate commitments. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's attention to China's climate policy — examined through the intersecting lenses of transition, governance, and market — reflects a broader scholarly recognition that understanding China's internal policy dynamics is indispensable for any serious analysis of the global energy transition. At a moment when the gap between nationally declared climate ambitions and verifiable domestic action remains a central source of geopolitical tension, rigorous political economy accounts of how China's climate institutions actually function are both timely and necessary.
China's climate governance architecture has undergone a profound structural transformation over the past decade. The announcement of the Dual Carbon Goals in 2020 — peak carbon emissions by 2030, carbon neutrality by 2060 — marked a qualitative shift in how the Chinese state framed its relationship to decarbonization. What had previously been articulated largely as an efficiency and energy-security agenda was recast as a sovereign climate commitment with a long temporal horizon. This discursive and institutional shift brought the National Development and Reform Commission and later the Ministry of Ecology and Environment into the center of an expanded regulatory apparatus. Yet the governance challenges that followed were formidable. China's political economy is characterized by fragmented authoritarianism — a system in which central mandates interact with local government interests, industrial policy imperatives, and the priorities of state-owned enterprises in ways that frequently produce implementation gaps. Provincial governments, historically evaluated on GDP growth metrics, have had powerful structural incentives to resist or dilute carbon constraints even when nominally complying with central directives. Any serious analysis of China's climate policy must therefore grapple with the tension between the ambition of central policy design and the political economy of subnational implementation.
The role of market mechanisms in China's climate governance is particularly significant and analytically complex. The launch of the national Emissions Trading System in 2021, initially covering the power sector alone before gradual sectoral expansion, represented a landmark institutional development — the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions volume. However, the architecture of China's ETS differs in important ways from the cap-and-trade models developed in the European Union and other advanced economies. Allowance allocation has been largely intensity-based rather than absolute-cap-based, meaning that total emissions can continue to rise even as covered entities improve their carbon intensity per unit of output. Price volatility, liquidity constraints, and concerns about data integrity and verification have further complicated the system's effectiveness as a credible decarbonization instrument. Scholars examining the relationship between market design and governance in the Chinese context must therefore situate the ETS not simply as a technical carbon pricing mechanism but as a hybrid institution that reflects the competing logics of market liberalization, state control, industrial policy, and environmental regulation — all of which pull in different directions within China's distinctive political-economic system.
The broader implications of China's climate policy transition extend well beyond domestic governance. China's extraordinary expansion of renewable energy capacity — particularly in solar photovoltaic manufacturing, wind power installation, and battery storage — has fundamentally restructured global green technology supply chains. Chinese firms now account for a dominant share of global solar panel production and are expanding rapidly in electric vehicles and grid-scale storage. This industrial transition has both accelerated the global energy transition, by dramatically reducing the cost of clean energy technologies, and introduced new geopolitical tensions, as Western governments have responded with tariffs, industrial subsidies, and supply chain diversification policies. The political economy of China's green industrial policy thus operates simultaneously as domestic climate governance and as a form of techno-industrial statecraft with strategic implications for the international order. ODA practitioners and development finance institutions operating in the Global South must navigate this landscape carefully, as China's Belt and Road Initiative has increasingly incorporated renewable energy projects alongside continued fossil fuel financing, creating a complex and sometimes contradictory external face for Chinese climate policy.
For researchers working at the intersection of Asian political economy and global development studies, the analytical framework suggested by a focus on transition, governance, and market offers a productive set of entry points into questions that will only intensify in coming years. The transition dimension foregrounds the structural economic adjustments that decarbonization demands — the reallocation of capital and labor from fossil-dependent industries, the management of politically sensitive employment in coal-producing regions, and the calibration of energy security concerns against emissions reduction targets. The governance dimension highlights the institutional and bureaucratic challenges of implementing ambitious climate policy through a state apparatus that is simultaneously centralized in its formal authority and fragmented in its actual operation. The market dimension raises critical questions about the conditions under which carbon pricing and other market instruments can be made effective in a political economy where state ownership, industrial policy, and regulatory discretion remain central features of economic life. Understanding how these three dimensions interact in practice is essential not only for assessing China's own climate trajectory but for drawing lessons relevant to other large developing economies considering similar institutional innovations. As the global community continues to negotiate the terms of a just and effective energy transition, China's policy experiments — their successes, their contradictions, and their ongoing evolution — will remain among the most consequential case studies in contemporary political economy.