Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-22
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China navigates its energy transition has emerged as one of the defining issues in contemporary global political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of its most ambitious deployers of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in the international climate order — simultaneously indispensable to any credible global decarbonization pathway and deeply resistant to the normative frameworks through which that pathway is typically articulated in Western-dominated multilateral forums. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages directly with this paradox by examining the intersection of climate transition, state governance, and market mechanisms in China's evolving policy architecture. Its significance lies not merely in its empirical contributions but in the conceptual challenge it poses to simplistic narratives that cast China either as a climate laggard or as an uncomplicated green pioneer.
At the heart of China's climate policy trajectory is a distinctive model of state-directed transition that does not map neatly onto either the liberal market environmentalism dominant in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries or the developmental statism associated with earlier phases of East Asian industrialization. Beijing's approach blends centralized target-setting — most visibly through its five-year planning cycle and its dual carbon goals of peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060 — with an increasingly marketized allocation of carbon permits through the national emissions trading scheme that formally launched in 2021. The governance dimension of this hybrid model is particularly consequential. Unlike the decentralized, civil-society-driven climate advocacy that characterizes European transitions, China's climate governance is vertically integrated through the party-state apparatus, with provincial governments bearing binding responsibility for meeting nationally disaggregated targets. This creates both coherence and rigidity: the system can mobilize enormous resources and enforce compliance in ways that democratic polities often cannot, but it also suppresses the kind of adaptive, bottom-up experimentation that scholars of sociotechnical transitions have identified as critical to long-run innovation.
The market dimension of China's climate policy has received growing scholarly attention, though it remains poorly understood in its institutional specifics. China's emissions trading system is now the largest carbon market by volume in the world, covering the power sector and eventually set to expand to steel, cement, aluminum, and other energy-intensive industries. Yet analysts have noted significant limitations: carbon prices have remained relatively low by European standards, compliance mechanisms have been inconsistently enforced, and the market's integration with broader financial and industrial policy has been incomplete. Understanding these limitations requires situating the emissions trading system within the broader political economy of Chinese state capitalism, where industrial ministries, state-owned enterprises, local governments, and financial regulators each bring distinct institutional interests to the table. The article's analytical focus on the governance-market nexus speaks directly to this complexity, illuminating the ways in which market instruments in China are not simply technical tools for price discovery but deeply political artifacts embedded in contested bureaucratic and economic terrain.
Connecting China's experience to broader regional and global trends in political economy reveals important comparative dimensions. Across Asia, governments from South Korea to India to Indonesia are grappling with analogous tensions between the imperatives of rapid economic development, energy security, and climate commitment. China's trajectory is watched closely by these governments not only because of China's scale but because its governance model offers an alternative to conditionality-laden development finance and the normative frameworks of international climate diplomacy. The implications for official development assistance flows and multilateral climate finance are substantial. China's Belt and Road Initiative, for all its controversy, has channeled significant capital into energy infrastructure across the Global South, and Beijing's domestic transition will inevitably shape the terms on which it finances energy projects abroad. Researchers and practitioners working on ODA and development finance must therefore treat China's internal climate governance not as a peripheral concern but as a structuring condition of the broader global development finance landscape.
The policy implications of this line of analysis are considerable. For international climate negotiators, the lesson is that engaging China on emissions reduction requires attending carefully to the domestic governance architecture through which climate targets are implemented — a point that abstract emissions pledges in nationally determined contributions often obscure. For development finance institutions and bilateral donors designing ODA programs in the Asia-Pacific and beyond, China's model raises questions about the conditions under which state-directed, market-using climate governance can be both effective and equitable, and what role civil society plays — or is permitted to play — in holding such governance accountable. For researchers in civil society studies and comparative political economy, this body of work underscores the importance of moving beyond binaries of state versus market and authoritarian versus democratic transitions toward more granular accounts of how institutional configurations shape the pace, distributional consequences, and social legitimacy of decarbonization.
Looking ahead, several dynamics merit sustained attention. The performance of China's emissions trading system over the next decade will be a critical empirical test of whether market mechanisms can function effectively in a context of constrained regulatory autonomy and limited civil society oversight. The politics of coal phase-down, which remains deeply entangled with questions of regional inequality and social stability in China's rust-belt provinces, will likely prove more difficult to manage than the deployment of renewables has been. And the interaction between China's domestic climate transition and its international economic relationships — through supply chains for critical minerals, technology transfer, and development finance — will shape the landscape within which all other climate actors must operate. Scholars at institutions like IOCSS are well-positioned to contribute to this research agenda, particularly by bringing civil society and governance perspectives to a literature that has sometimes privileged techno-economic and diplomatic framings at the expense of questions about accountability, participation, and the politics of just transition.