Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-25
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter governs its climate transition has moved from the margins of international environmental discourse to its very center. China accounts for roughly 30 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the trajectory of its energy system over the next two decades will determine whether internationally agreed temperature targets remain achievable in any meaningful sense. At the same time, China's approach to climate governance is not merely a technical question of energy policy but a window into broader dynamics of state capacity, market design, and political economy in a system that defies easy categorization. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" engages precisely this terrain, situating China's evolving climate apparatus within the frameworks of political economy that have long animated scholarship on Asian developmental states and their post-developmental transformations.
The conceptual core of any serious analysis of China's climate governance must grapple with the distinctive fusion of market instruments and authoritarian state direction that characterizes Chinese policy in this domain. China has invested more in renewable energy capacity than any other country, launched the world's largest national carbon emissions trading scheme in 2021, and embedded climate targets within its Five-Year Plan architecture — yet it has simultaneously continued to expand coal-fired generation capacity both domestically and through overseas financing. This apparent contradiction resolves somewhat when viewed through the lens of developmental statecraft: the Chinese state has pursued climate transition not as an externally imposed constraint but as a strategic opportunity to dominate emerging clean energy supply chains, from solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles and battery storage. The governance question is therefore not simply whether China will decarbonize, but how the state deploys market mechanisms as instruments of industrial policy rather than as depoliticized efficiency tools, and what the implications of that approach are for global climate outcomes and international economic competition. Scholarship in the Journal of Contemporary Asia tradition is well positioned to interrogate this dynamic, given the journal's long engagement with questions of state-market relations across the region.
The market dimension of China's climate governance — particularly its national emissions trading system — deserves analytical attention that goes beyond surface-level institutional description. The Chinese ETS, which covers the power sector and represents approximately 4.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent annually, operates on a benchmark-intensity basis rather than an absolute cap, a design choice that reflects both technical constraints and political economy considerations. Intensity-based benchmarking allows continued output growth while rewarding cleaner production, a design that serves the interests of a state still committed to industrial expansion but also under pressure to demonstrate credible climate commitment. The governance challenges that have emerged — including data quality problems, regional implementation disparities, and the question of how to expand sectoral coverage without triggering politically sensitive economic disruption — illuminate deeper tensions between central policy ambition and local political economy. Local governments and state-owned enterprises have long operated under contradictory incentive structures, and climate governance has not simply dissolved those contradictions but has added a new layer of negotiation between central directives and subnational actors whose revenue bases and employment profiles remain tied to carbon-intensive industries. Research that maps these governance dynamics with empirical precision performs a genuine service for both scholarly understanding and policy design.
China's climate transition also carries profound implications for the broader landscape of development finance, official development assistance, and civil society engagement that defines much of IOCSS's research agenda. The Belt and Road Initiative has been a significant vehicle for exporting Chinese energy infrastructure, and the composition of that infrastructure — the balance between coal, gas, and renewables — has shifted considerably under both domestic and international pressure. China's 2021 pledge to stop building new coal plants abroad marked a significant policy shift, though implementation has been uneven and the question of existing project pipelines remains contested. For recipient countries in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, Chinese clean energy financing represents a genuine opportunity but also carries questions about technology lock-in, debt sustainability, and the degree to which governance standards and environmental impact assessments are applied consistently. Civil society organizations in recipient countries have found the space to engage with Chinese project developers to be considerably more constrained than with traditional OECD DAC donors, raising important questions about accountability, transparency, and the norms that should govern development finance in an era of geopolitical competition over green infrastructure. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article's framing of climate governance as a political economy question rather than a purely technical one is directly relevant to these ODA-adjacent dynamics.
Looking forward, the analytical stakes of understanding China's climate governance trajectory are difficult to overstate for researchers and practitioners alike. The next decade will witness the critical intersection of China's 2030 peak emissions target, the scale-up of its carbon market, the restructuring of global clean energy supply chains, and the ongoing competition between Chinese and Western development finance in the global South. For scholars in the political economy tradition, China represents both a stress test of existing theoretical frameworks — developmental state theory, varieties of capitalism, green growth models — and a source of new empirical material that demands theoretical innovation. For practitioners in ODA and development finance, understanding the motivations, constraints, and governance logics driving Chinese climate policy is essential for designing complementary interventions, identifying spaces for cooperation, and maintaining credible standards in a competitive financing environment. The article's attention to the interplay of transition, governance, and market provides a conceptually productive entry point for this research agenda, and the broader question it raises — whether market mechanisms embedded in authoritarian governance structures can deliver the pace and depth of decarbonization that the climate emergency demands — is one that will remain at the center of both scholarly and policy debate for years to come.