Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-17
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how major carbon-emitting states reconcile developmental imperatives with climate commitments has become one of the defining governance challenges of the twenty-first century. No country embodies this tension more acutely than China, which simultaneously stands as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its largest installer of renewable energy capacity, and a leading financier of fossil-fuel infrastructure across the Global South. Understanding how China navigates climate governance — through the interplay of central policy mandates, subnational political economies, and market mechanisms — is therefore not simply a question of environmental science or energy technology. It is a question of political economy, state capacity, and the architecture of global climate order. Scholarly work that situates China's climate trajectory within the broader dynamics of governance and market transition makes an important contribution precisely because it refuses to treat environmental outcomes as separable from the structures of power, incentive, and institutional design through which they are produced.
The analytical framework centered on transition, governance, and market captures something essential about China's distinctive approach to climate policy. China's climate commitments — including its pledge to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the so-called "dual carbon" goals announced in 2020 — are not simply expressions of ecological concern. They are deeply intertwined with a state-led vision of industrial upgrading, technological sovereignty, and geopolitical positioning. The Chinese state has pursued decarbonization through a combination of administrative command, industrial policy, and market instruments, including one of the world's largest emissions trading systems, launched nationally in 2021 after years of provincial piloting. What makes this constellation analytically interesting is that each of these mechanisms embodies different logics of governance: hierarchical directive, sectoral planning, and price-based allocation, respectively. Examining how these logics interact, reinforce, and sometimes undermine one another is essential to understanding why China's climate policy produces the outcomes it does — and why the gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground implementation remains substantial in many domains.
Governance fragmentation is a recurring theme in analyses of Chinese climate politics, and for good reason. China's environmental governance operates across multiple administrative layers, from the central ministries in Beijing to provincial governments, prefecture-level cities, and county-level authorities. Local governments face structural pressures — revenue dependence on industrial activity, employment obligations, and political incentives tied to GDP growth metrics — that can work against the faithful implementation of national climate directives. The persistence of coal consumption in many inland provinces, even as coastal regions accelerate renewable deployment, reflects not simply inertia but the active political economy of subnational actors managing competing demands. This dynamic has been further complicated by recent shifts in China's broader governance environment, including the recentralization of authority under Xi Jinping and the reorganization of environmental oversight institutions. Whether centralization ultimately strengthens or weakens climate implementation is an open empirical question: stronger top-down enforcement can overcome local resistance, but it can also reduce the adaptive flexibility that effective climate governance requires. Scholarly analysis that takes this governance terrain seriously, rather than treating China's climate commitments as straightforwardly translating into policy outcomes, performs an important corrective function.
The market dimension of China's climate transition deserves particular attention in the context of regional and global political economy. China's national emissions trading scheme covers the power sector and is among the most expansive carbon markets in the world by volume of emissions regulated, though its price levels have historically been modest compared to the European Union Emissions Trading System. The design of this market — the allocation of permits, the treatment of offsets, the mechanisms for price discovery — is not a technocratic matter but a deeply political one, reflecting the interests of state-owned energy enterprises, the priorities of industrial policy planners, and the constraints of financial system development. Beyond its domestic market, China's climate-linked industrial policy has produced global market effects of considerable significance: the dramatic reduction in the cost of solar photovoltaic panels and electric vehicle batteries over the past decade is substantially attributable to Chinese state support for domestic manufacturing at scale. This creates a complex dynamic in which China simultaneously contributes to global decarbonization through technology cost reduction while generating trade friction with partners who view Chinese industrial subsidies as market-distorting. The political economy of China's green industrial policy is thus inseparable from the geopolitics of climate cooperation and competition.
For practitioners and researchers working at the intersection of development finance, civil society, and climate governance, the implications of China's climate transition extend well beyond its borders. Chinese overseas development finance, channeled through policy banks such as the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, has historically supported a significant share of coal and hydropower infrastructure in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Announced policy shifts — including a 2021 pledge by President Xi to cease building new coal plants abroad — suggest a reorientation, though the translation of such commitments into institutional practice remains a subject of active monitoring and debate among development scholars. How China's domestic climate governance trajectory shapes its international development finance posture will have substantial consequences for the climate futures of partner countries and for the evolving architecture of multilateral climate finance. Understanding the domestic political-economic dynamics that produced China's climate policy — its tensions, its drivers, its institutional mediations — is therefore not a matter of purely academic interest. It is indispensable to anyone engaged with the practical challenges of mobilizing climate action in a world where China's choices carry systemic weight, and where the relationship between state power, market dynamics, and environmental governance continues to be actively contested and remade.