Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-27
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate governance, market transition, and state capacity has emerged as one of the defining questions of twenty-first century political economy, and nowhere is this more consequential than in China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of its most ambitious investors in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a singular and paradoxical position in global climate politics. The country's trajectory will, in substantial measure, determine whether the international community meets its Paris Agreement commitments, yet the internal mechanics of how China translates political ambition into governance outcomes — and how market instruments are integrated into a fundamentally state-directed economy — remain insufficiently understood in mainstream scholarship. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses precisely this gap, offering an analytically rigorous account of how China is negotiating the complex tensions between developmental imperatives, governance restructuring, and the expanding role of market mechanisms in its climate policy architecture.
China's climate policy trajectory represents a distinctive model of what scholars of comparative political economy might term "authoritarian environmentalism," though this label obscures more than it reveals. The article engages with this complexity by tracing how the Chinese state has progressively repositioned climate action not merely as an external diplomatic obligation but as a domestic governance priority intertwined with industrial policy, energy security, and the political legitimacy of the Communist Party. The shift from the Kyoto Protocol era, when China consistently resisted binding emissions commitments on developmental grounds, to the post-Paris period, in which Beijing has voluntarily set ambitious nationally determined contributions and announced a 2060 carbon neutrality target, is not merely rhetorical. It reflects structural changes in China's economic model — notably the declining returns to carbon-intensive heavy industry, the emergence of globally competitive clean energy sectors, and growing domestic public awareness of air quality and environmental degradation as governance failures. The article's contribution is to interrogate the governance mechanisms through which these structural incentives are being translated into policy, identifying where institutional capacity is sufficient and where significant gaps and contradictions persist.
A central analytical thread concerns the design and performance of China's national emissions trading scheme (ETS), launched in 2021 and now the largest carbon market by covered emissions in the world. The transition from a patchwork of regional pilot schemes to a unified national system represents an enormous institutional undertaking, one that illuminates broader questions about how market instruments function within a state-directed economic framework. Unlike carbon markets in the European Union or California, China's ETS operates in an environment characterized by limited regulatory independence, data integrity challenges, and complex principal-agent problems between central authorities and provincial governments whose fiscal interests are often tied to carbon-intensive industries. The article's analysis is particularly valuable in mapping the governance architecture of the ETS — the roles of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the network of verified emissions reporting agencies — and in identifying where the system's credibility is most vulnerable. This has direct implications for how international observers and development finance institutions should assess China's climate commitments: market-based instruments do not function in an institutional vacuum, and the effectiveness of China's carbon pricing will depend on governance reforms that are politically difficult precisely because they challenge entrenched local interests.
The article's contribution also extends to the broader regional and global dimensions of China's climate transition. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has long attracted criticism for financing carbon-intensive infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the announcement in 2021 that China would no longer build new coal-fired power plants overseas was widely interpreted as a significant shift. Yet the translation of this political commitment into lending practice has been uneven, and questions remain about whether Chinese policy banks and state enterprises are genuinely redirecting capital toward green infrastructure or whether the shift is primarily cosmetic. This connects directly to debates within the ODA and development finance community about the role of emerging donors and the extent to which China's growing engagement with climate finance frameworks — including its participation in discussions around the New Collective Quantified Goal — reflects a genuine convergence with OECD norms or a strategic repositioning that preserves Chinese developmental autonomy. The article's governance lens is well suited to these questions, as it draws attention to the institutional and political economy factors that mediate between stated policy and observed outcomes.
From a policy and research perspective, the article makes several contributions that merit attention from practitioners in development cooperation, climate finance, and regional governance. First, it underscores that the effectiveness of market-based climate instruments in emerging economies cannot be assessed independently of the broader governance context in which they are embedded. Donors and multilateral institutions that are considering co-financing or capacity support for carbon market development in China or in countries adopting Chinese governance models would benefit from this granular understanding of how institutional design shapes market performance. Second, the article's focus on the transition dimension — the political economy of managing the decline of carbon-intensive industries and the distributional consequences for workers and communities — raises issues that are highly relevant to the just transition discourse that has gained prominence in both development and climate policy circles. China's experience navigating coal-dependent regions and the political management of industrial restructuring offers lessons, both cautionary and instructive, for other major emerging economies including India, Indonesia, and South Africa.
Looking forward, the questions raised by this article are likely to grow more rather than less pressing. As the global stocktake process under the Paris Agreement begins to reveal the scale of the gap between current policies and the 1.5-degree pathway, the international community's ability to achieve meaningful climate outcomes will depend in substantial measure on whether China's domestic governance capacity can keep pace with its political ambitions. The integration of market mechanisms into China's climate governance architecture is still at an early stage, and the institutional learning required to make the ETS a credible and effective instrument will take years. At the same time, the geopolitical context — including tensions with the United States, the restructuring of global supply chains, and contested norms around development finance — creates significant uncertainty about the degree to which China will engage constructively with multilateral climate governance frameworks. Researchers working at the intersection of Asian political economy, comparative climate governance, and development studies will find in this article a theoretically grounded and empirically attentive contribution to one of the most consequential policy questions of the coming decades. The challenge for practitioners will be to translate its analytical insights into governance support frameworks that are realistic about China's political economy while maintaining the highest possible ambitions for global climate outcomes.