Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-26
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
Few challenges in contemporary global governance illustrate the intersection of political economy, state capacity, and international obligation as acutely as China's management of its climate transition. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the leading deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a structurally contradictory position in the global climate order — one that complicates tidy narratives of either leadership or recalcitrance. The publication of this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when the credibility of China's climate commitments is under intense scrutiny: the dual carbon targets announced in 2020 — carbon peaking before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — have generated both cautious optimism among climate diplomats and deep skepticism among independent analysts who question whether institutional capacity and political will can sustain the scale of transformation required. Understanding how China navigates the tensions between developmental imperatives, governance fragmentation, and market construction is therefore not merely an academic concern but a question with direct bearing on the trajectory of global climate outcomes.
The article's focus on transition, governance, and market as analytically interlocking categories reflects a sophisticated awareness that China's climate policy cannot be understood through any single lens. The energy transition dimension captures the technical and economic challenge of restructuring a coal-dependent industrial system that has powered the most rapid large-scale urbanization and manufacturing expansion in recorded history. But transition in China is never merely techno-economic; it is mediated by a governance architecture that remains deeply fragmented along vertical and horizontal lines. Provincial governments retain considerable discretion over energy mix, land use, and industrial policy, and their incentive structures have historically privileged GDP growth and employment security over ecological compliance. The central government's reliance on target-setting cascaded downward through the administrative hierarchy — a system whose brittleness was exposed during episodes such as the abrupt power rationing events of 2021, when local officials struggling to meet energy intensity targets resorted to sudden load-shedding that disrupted both industrial production and household welfare. The article's attention to governance therefore situates climate policy within the broader political economy of center-periphery relations in China, a relationship that remains constitutive of policy outcomes across virtually every domain.
The market dimension of the analysis is perhaps the most analytically generative, as it engages directly with one of the central ambitions of China's climate policy architecture: the construction of a national emissions trading scheme capable of pricing carbon and redirecting investment toward lower-emission activities. Launched nationally in 2021 and covering the power sector — the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions in nominal terms — China's ETS has nonetheless attracted considerable criticism for its design characteristics, including the use of intensity-based benchmarks rather than absolute caps, weak enforcement mechanisms, and persistent allowance oversupply that has kept carbon prices at levels insufficient to drive meaningful fuel-switching or technology investment. The tension between market-construction aspirations and the administrative legacies of a planned economy is visible throughout the ETS's institutional history, as regulators have struggled to establish reliable data verification systems in an environment where firms have strong incentives to underreport emissions. This tension is not unique to China — carbon markets globally have confronted similar challenges of environmental integrity versus political feasibility — but it takes on particular dimensions in a Leninist party-state where regulatory agencies operate under the shadow of higher political priorities and where the boundary between public and private economic actors remains institutionally ambiguous.
Situated within broader regional and global trends, this analysis speaks to a wider pattern observable across major emerging economies: the attempt to simultaneously pursue developmental objectives and meet increasingly demanding international climate expectations, often by constructing hybrid policy architectures that blend state direction with market incentives. The Belt and Road Initiative adds a further layer of complexity, as China's overseas energy investments have carried significant fossil fuel components even as official rhetoric has pivoted toward green development and carbon-reduced financing commitments. Civil society actors — both domestic environmental NGOs operating under tight regulatory constraints and international organizations navigating the delicate politics of engagement with Chinese counterparts — play a marginal but not insignificant role in this landscape, primarily through advocacy, monitoring, and technical assistance functions that complement rather than challenge state authority. The article's framing within the Journal of Contemporary Asia also invites comparison with other regional trajectories: Japan's post-Fukushima energy dilemmas, South Korea's Green New Deal ambitions, and India's contested renewable expansion all share the structural feature of climate governance systems that must reconcile growth imperatives with decarbonization commitments within political economies shaped by specific historical trajectories of state-market-society relations.
The policy implications of this kind of scholarship are substantial for both domestic reformers and international partners. For Chinese policymakers, the analysis underlines the need for deeper institutional reform of the ETS — including the extension of coverage to high-emitting sectors beyond power, the tightening of allocation methodologies, and the strengthening of monitoring, reporting, and verification infrastructure — as preconditions for the market to function as a genuine decarbonization driver rather than a compliance formality. For international partners, particularly those in the development finance and climate cooperation space, the findings counsel realism about the pace and linearity of China's transition: the political economy of coal phase-down involves not only technical substitution but the management of regional labor markets, state-owned enterprise balance sheets, and provincial fiscal dependencies that cannot be resolved through price signals alone. For researchers, the article's theoretical contribution lies in its insistence that governance structure is not merely a context variable for climate policy but a constitutive element of what decarbonization can realistically mean in a particular political order.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by at least three dynamics that scholars and practitioners should monitor closely. First, the evolution of China's ETS into its next phases — including projected sectoral expansion and potential price floor mechanisms — will serve as a practical test of whether administrative and market logics can be durably reconciled within Chinese regulatory institutions. Second, the geopolitical context of climate cooperation between China and Western economies will continue to shape the space available for technical exchange, joint standard-setting, and financial innovation; the intensification of strategic competition risks hollowing out multilateral climate forums precisely when coordination demands are most urgent. Third, the domestic politics of ecological civilization — the ideological frame through which the party-state has sought to legitimate climate governance — will evolve as economic pressures, public expectations, and international obligations interact in ways that may not always align. For an institute concerned with the relationship between governance, development, and global public goods, the study of China's climate transition offers a rich empirical terrain whose implications extend well beyond any single country's borders, touching the foundational questions of how large states build, reform, and legitimate governance institutions in an era of accelerating ecological constraint.