Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-28
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China manages its climate transition sits at the intersection of some of the most consequential debates in contemporary political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest investor in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate governance. The stakes of its policy choices extend far beyond its borders: the pace and architecture of China's decarbonization will shape whether the international community has any realistic chance of meeting the temperature thresholds established under the Paris Agreement. It is against this backdrop that scholarship examining China's climate policy through the intertwined lenses of governance transformation and market construction becomes not merely academically significant but urgently practical. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, enters this contested terrain by interrogating how China is navigating the transition from a carbon-intensive developmental model toward a lower-emission political economy — and the institutional and market mechanisms being deployed to facilitate that passage.
China's climate commitments, formally anchored in its Nationally Determined Contributions and its announced dual carbon goals of peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, represent an extraordinary administrative challenge for a developmental state of China's complexity. What makes the governance dimension particularly rich for scholarly analysis is the multi-scalar nature of the challenge: the central state must translate aspirational national targets into enforceable mandates across provinces with vastly different industrial compositions, energy profiles, and political economies. Provinces in the rust-belt northeast, whose identities and livelihoods are inseparable from coal and heavy manufacturing, face a fundamentally different transition calculus than coastal provinces already deeply integrated into renewable supply chains and high-technology manufacturing. The article's focus on governance thus opens a productive line of inquiry into how the Chinese state is attempting to coordinate this heterogeneous landscape — through regulatory mandates, fiscal transfers, administrative accountability mechanisms, and the construction of new market institutions — while managing the political risks of an uneven transition that could generate significant local resistance.
Central to China's market-based climate governance strategy is the national Emissions Trading System, officially launched in 2021 and now the largest carbon market in the world by covered emissions volume. The ETS represents a significant ideological as well as institutional departure: it embeds a price-based allocation mechanism into what remains a heavily state-directed economy, creating a site where market signals and administrative commands intersect in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Early assessments of the Chinese ETS have pointed to structural weaknesses — notably the allocation of allowances based on output-intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps, which blunts the cost signal for large emitters and may allow overall emissions to continue rising even as per-unit efficiency improves. The tension between market construction and state objectives is therefore not incidental but constitutive: China is not simply importing a neoliberal instrument, but adapting it to the imperatives of a political economy in which the state retains a controlling interest in major emitting industries and in which social stability concerns constrain the pace at which prices can be allowed to bite. Scholarly engagement with this tension is essential for understanding both the limits and the possibilities of market mechanisms as tools of climate governance in non-liberal state contexts.
The broader regional and global dimensions of China's climate transition are equally significant for scholars of ODA, development finance, and civil society. China's Belt and Road Initiative has been a major vehicle for exporting energy infrastructure to the Global South, and the composition of that infrastructure — historically coal-heavy, though with a growing renewable component — has made the BRI a flashpoint in debates about sustainable development finance. The Chinese government's 2021 announcement that it would no longer finance new coal-fired power plants abroad represented a significant rhetorical pivot, though the translation of this commitment into consistent practice across the network of state-owned banks, policy banks, and development finance institutions that fund BRI projects remains uneven and contested. For researchers working on ODA and development cooperation, China's climate turn raises important questions about conditionality, transparency, and alignment with recipient-country needs. It also creates opportunities for comparative analysis with DAC donors who have long faced pressure to green their development finance portfolios, highlighting that the challenges of aligning development finance with climate goals are not unique to China but are structural features of the relationship between capital export, industrial interest, and environmental governance.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by at least three intersecting dynamics that researchers and practitioners would do well to monitor closely. First, the political economy of domestic transition will continue to generate distributional conflicts that test the central government's capacity to maintain social coalitions in support of decarbonization — particularly as the phasedown of coal employment and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises create localized economic disruption. Second, the evolution of China's carbon market, including anticipated expansions into the steel, cement, and chemical sectors, will provide a real-world test of whether market-based governance can be effective under conditions of limited price discovery, constrained civil society monitoring, and pervasive state ownership of regulated entities. Third, geopolitical dynamics — particularly the deepening fracture between Chinese and Western climate diplomacy in the context of broader strategic competition — will increasingly shape the terms on which China engages multilateral climate institutions and the degree to which domestic policy trajectories can be influenced by international normative pressure. For civil society organizations and development researchers operating in this space, the implication is clear: understanding China's climate transition requires moving beyond simple narratives of either leadership or obstruction, and engaging instead with the granular political economy of governance reform, market construction, and distributional conflict that will ultimately determine whether China's climate ambitions translate into measurable atmospheric outcomes.