Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-16
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
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The question of how the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter governs its own climate transition has become one of the most consequential puzzles in contemporary international political economy. China accounts for roughly 30 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and simultaneously represents the single greatest potential lever for altering the trajectory of planetary warming. As multilateral climate diplomacy has strained under the weight of geopolitical rivalry and wavering commitment from major Western economies, the internal dynamics of China's climate governance have attracted renewed scholarly attention. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, enters this debate by examining the interlocking relationships between state policy, institutional governance architecture, and market mechanisms — a trifecta that defines the peculiar character of China's green transition and distinguishes it from both liberal market-led models and simple command-economy dirigisme.
At the heart of the article's analytical contribution is the recognition that China's climate policy cannot be understood through any single theoretical lens. The conventional framing in much Western scholarship has tended to oscillate between two poles: either skepticism about the sincerity of China's commitments, rooted in a reading of the Chinese state as fundamentally growth-maximizing and reluctant to subordinate development to environmental objectives, or optimism grounded in the impressive scale of China's renewable energy deployment and its formal pledges under the Paris Agreement — notably the Dual Carbon targets of peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060. The article resists both positions and instead directs analytical attention toward the governance processes through which climate objectives are translated, or sometimes distorted, into institutional practice. This is methodologically and substantively significant: it shifts the question from "is China serious about climate?" to "how does China's particular state-market configuration shape the outcomes of climate policy?"
The governance dimension of China's climate transition is especially complex given the country's multi-level administrative system. Central government declarations of climate ambition — whether in Five-Year Plans, State Council directives, or the pronouncements of the National Development and Reform Commission and its successor institutions — must be operationalized through a labyrinthine chain of provincial governments, local bureaus, and state-owned enterprises, each of which carries its own fiscal interests, political incentives, and developmental imperatives. One of the persistent findings in the political economy literature on Chinese environmental governance is the phenomenon of policy slippage: central mandates that encounter obstruction, creative non-compliance, or outright evasion at subnational levels where officials continue to prioritize GDP growth and employment protection. The article's engagement with this dynamic situates it within a broader body of scholarship on the gap between China's stated environmental ambitions and the messy realities of implementation. What distinguishes the current period, however, is an apparent intensification of central government capacity to monitor, enforce, and sanction, driven in part by Xi Jinping's consolidation of authority and a reconfigured cadre evaluation system that now weights environmental performance more heavily alongside traditional growth metrics.
The market dimension examined by the article centers on China's National Emissions Trading System, which became operational for compliance purposes in 2021 and now constitutes the world's largest carbon market by volume of covered emissions. The ETS represents a significant institutional experiment — an attempt to harness price signals to drive decarbonization within an economy where the state retains commanding ownership over key industrial sectors and where market mechanisms have historically operated under heavy administrative oversight. The article's analysis of the ETS is likely to grapple with well-documented structural tensions: allowance allocations that have been criticized as excessively generous, limited price volatility that reduces the cost-incentive for abatement investment, restricted sectoral coverage that initially encompassed only the power sector, and questions about data integrity given the 2021 revelations of widespread falsification of emissions reporting by third-party verifiers. These are not peripheral technical complaints but strike at the credibility of the market mechanism as a driver of genuine transition. At the same time, the ETS represents a learning institution, and the gradual tightening of allocations and expansion to additional sectors such as steel, cement, and aluminum points toward a trajectory of increasing stringency — though at a pace calibrated to political and economic tolerances.
The policy implications of this analysis are substantial for researchers and practitioners engaged with climate finance, development assistance, and multilateral environmental governance. For donor countries and international organizations considering how to engage with China on climate, the article's governance-centered framing suggests that technical assistance and capacity-building directed at institutional reform — improving MRV systems, strengthening regulatory independence, supporting subnational implementation capacity — may yield more durable outcomes than headline diplomatic commitments alone. For scholars of comparative political economy, the Chinese case poses a genuine theoretical challenge to standard accounts of how developmental states navigate the environmental Kuznets curve, since China appears to be attempting to compress the transition timeline through deliberate industrial policy rather than waiting for income levels to generate organic demand for cleaner production. The article's contribution to this debate adds to a growing literature that treats China's climate governance not as an anomaly to be explained away but as a distinctive model whose internal logic merits serious engagement.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate transition will be shaped by several intersecting pressures that the article's analytical framework is well-positioned to illuminate. The impending introduction of the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will subject Chinese exporters in energy-intensive sectors to carbon pricing on goods entering the European market, creating an exogenous fiscal incentive for domestic decarbonization that complements — and may accelerate — internal ETS reforms. Meanwhile, the rapid cost decline of solar photovoltaics and battery storage, sectors in which Chinese manufacturers now hold dominant global market share, is reshaping the economic calculus of the energy transition in ways that increasingly align commercial interest with decarbonization objectives. Whether China's governance architecture can absorb and channel these dynamics efficiently — integrating market signals, coordinating central and local action, and managing the distributional consequences of transition for coal-dependent regions and workers — remains an open empirical and political question. The article under review makes a timely scholarly contribution by insisting that answering this question requires sustained, granular attention to the institutional sinews of Chinese climate governance, rather than reliance on aggregate indicators or diplomatic posturing. For researchers and policy practitioners working at the intersection of Asian political economy and global environmental governance, this kind of analytically grounded, empirically attentive scholarship is precisely what the field needs.