Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-15
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases manages its transition to a lower-carbon economy has become one of the defining questions of twenty-first-century political economy. China's dual position — as both an indispensable actor in global climate diplomacy and a rapidly industrializing state with enormous developmental ambitions — creates structural tensions that no other country faces at comparable scale. Against the backdrop of accelerating climate impacts, intensifying geopolitical rivalry between Washington and Beijing, and mounting pressure on multilateral institutions to deliver meaningful emissions reductions, scholarly attention to the domestic architecture of China's climate governance has never been more warranted. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a moment when analysts are increasingly skeptical of high-level diplomatic pledges and increasingly focused on the institutional, regulatory, and market mechanisms that will determine whether stated ambitions translate into durable transformation.
At the heart of the analysis is a tension that runs through virtually all serious scholarship on Chinese environmental governance: the gap between policy articulation and policy implementation. China has set ambitious headline targets, most notably its pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement and the subsequent announcement of a carbon neutrality goal by 2060, alongside a peak emissions target of 2030. What the article engages with, in the tradition of the Journal of Contemporary Asia's longstanding interest in the political economy of developmental states, is the governance architecture through which these targets are supposed to be achieved. This means looking beyond the announcements of the National Development and Reform Commission or the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and examining instead the layered and often contradictory set of incentives facing provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, local regulators, and private firms. China's political system concentrates formal authority at the center while devolving implementation responsibility — and, crucially, many of the costs — to subnational actors whose interests do not always align with national climate targets. Understanding this principal-agent problem is essential to any realistic assessment of China's climate trajectory.
The role of market mechanisms occupies a central place in the article's framing, and this is analytically significant for several reasons. China launched its national Emissions Trading Scheme in 2021, creating what is by traded volume the largest carbon market in the world. Yet the design and operation of this market reflects distinctly Chinese institutional characteristics: it is heavily managed, relies on intensity-based rather than absolute caps in its initial phase, and operates under conditions of significant information asymmetry between regulated entities and overseers. The article's attention to the market dimension of China's climate policy engages with a broader theoretical debate about whether market instruments can function as genuine mechanisms of decarbonization within a state-capitalist framework, or whether they serve primarily as signals of international credibility while substantive outcomes are determined by administrative directives and investment mandates from the party-state. This question has considerable relevance beyond China, as other middle-income countries observe the Chinese model and consider what aspects of it might be adapted to their own contexts.
Placing China's climate governance in regional and global perspective reveals important dynamics for researchers working in ODA and development policy. China is not only managing a domestic energy transition; it is simultaneously the world's largest financier of overseas energy infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative, the dominant manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries, and a growing provider of green development finance through institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The choices China makes in its domestic governance of the energy transition therefore have cascading effects on recipient countries across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Whether Chinese overseas energy finance pivots durably toward renewables, and under what conditionalities, is a question with direct implications for the sovereignty, fiscal sustainability, and carbon trajectories of dozens of lower-income countries. Scholars working on ODA effectiveness and South-South cooperation need to integrate China's domestic climate governance dynamics into their analytical frameworks, because the internal pressures and incentive structures shaping Chinese policy at home are the same forces that shape what China offers and demands abroad.
The policy implications of this line of analysis are substantial, both for international climate negotiators and for development practitioners operating in regions where Chinese financing is consequential. For negotiators, the implication is that engagement with China on climate must be sensitive to the domestic political economy constraints facing Chinese policymakers, rather than treating China as a unitary actor capable of simply delivering on whatever commitments emerge from high-level summits. For development practitioners, especially those working within ODA frameworks that seek to mainstream climate considerations, the analysis reinforces the importance of understanding Chinese institutional actors not as a monolith but as a set of bureaucratic, commercial, and subnational interests that respond to different pressures and incentives. Civil society organizations seeking to influence Chinese overseas investment patterns, for example, will find more traction engaging with specific regulatory windows and market mechanisms than with formal diplomatic channels alone.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by at least three intersecting forces that future research will need to track closely. First, the pace and character of China's own energy security calculations: the COVID-era supply disruptions and the broader geopolitical fracturing of global commodity markets have, in some respects, accelerated China's domestic renewable energy build-out, because homegrown solar and wind reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels. Second, the evolution of the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and analogous instruments in other major economies, which create new external pressures on Chinese exporters and, by extension, on Chinese regulators to demonstrate the credibility of domestic carbon pricing. Third, the internal dynamics of China's party-state system as it navigates the social and economic dislocations associated with transitioning away from coal-dependent industries and communities. Each of these forces creates both opportunities and risks for the kind of governance reform that effective climate action ultimately requires. For researchers at institutions like IOCSS engaged with the intersection of political economy, development finance, and global governance, China's climate transition is not a peripheral case study but a central analytical site for understanding how power, institutions, and markets interact in the reshaping of the twenty-first-century global order.