Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-29
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China navigates its climate commitments has become one of the defining geopolitical and developmental puzzles of the current era. 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 that defies easy categorization within either the developmental or post-developmental frameworks that have long structured international debates. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, takes up precisely this tension by examining how China's climate policy has evolved at the intersection of state-led transition strategies, shifting governance architectures, and market mechanisms that are themselves neither purely domestic nor fully integrated into global carbon finance regimes. At a moment when the international community continues to debate the sufficiency of national climate pledges and the coherence of multilateral frameworks, a rigorous examination of China's internal policy dynamics offers both analytical value and urgent practical relevance for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working across the development-environment nexus.
The central contribution of the article lies in its treatment of China's climate policy not as a monolithic state directive but as a contested and evolving set of arrangements produced through the interaction of central authority, local governance actors, industrial constituencies, and market instruments. This framing is significant because it departs from two common but analytically inadequate approaches: the first, which tends to portray Chinese climate policy as a top-down technocratic exercise driven by authoritative central planning, and the second, which reduces China's environmental commitments to strategic signaling in the context of great power competition. By foregrounding transition as a process rather than an outcome, the article draws attention to the institutional frictions, subnational variation, and sectoral politics that shape how decarbonization ambitions are translated — or not translated — into actual emissions trajectories. The governance dimension of this analysis is particularly valuable, as it illuminates the ways in which administrative restructuring, regulatory experimentation, and the distribution of implementation responsibilities across levels of government create both opportunities and constraints for meaningful climate action. China's experience with pilot carbon trading schemes, for instance, reveals how market instruments designed to harness price signals must still operate within a political economy where state-owned enterprises retain privileged access to credit, regulatory forbearance, and policy protection.
The article's engagement with market mechanisms deserves particular attention from a regional and comparative perspective. China's national carbon market, formally launched as a compliance scheme for the power sector in 2021 and subsequently expanded, represents the largest such market in the world by covered emissions volume. Yet its performance has been the subject of significant debate among environmental economists and policy scholars: trading volumes have remained relatively thin, price discovery has been sluggish, and the allocation methodology has faced criticism for rewarding emissions intensity reductions rather than absolute cuts. The article situates these dynamics within a broader analysis of how market governance in China is embedded within — and constrained by — the imperatives of industrial policy, energy security, and social stability concerns that continue to define the state's developmental priorities. This embeddedness is not simply a governance failure; it reflects deeper structural features of China's political economy that complicate the wholesale importation of neoliberal carbon pricing models developed in different institutional contexts. For ODA researchers and development finance practitioners, this insight resonates strongly with long-standing critiques of conditionality-based environmental policy transfer, suggesting that the institutional preconditions for effective carbon markets cannot be separated from questions of state capacity, political economy, and the distribution of adjustment costs across sectors and populations.
From the standpoint of broader global and regional trends, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship examining what China's rise as a climate actor means for the architecture of international development cooperation and environmental governance. China's Belt and Road Initiative has been the subject of intense scrutiny regarding its environmental footprint, with critics pointing to the continued financing of coal-fired power plants in recipient countries even as domestic coal consumption has nominally peaked. The tension between China's domestic decarbonization agenda and its overseas investment patterns raises important questions about the coherence of its climate governance and the degree to which the market and governance reforms analyzed in this article can be expected to diffuse outward through Chinese development finance institutions. At the same time, there is increasing evidence that Chinese actors — including both state-owned banks and private developers — are shifting toward renewable energy project financing abroad, driven by a combination of reputational concerns, host-country policy requirements, and the maturation of Chinese clean energy industries seeking export markets. Understanding the domestic governance transformations driving this shift is therefore directly relevant to development cooperation researchers studying how China's emerging role as a development financier intersects with global climate objectives.
The research significance of this article extends beyond the China-specific literature to engage broader theoretical questions about the relationship between state capacity, market design, and ecological transition in late-developing economies. The journal's long-standing engagement with questions of political economy in the Asian context provides an appropriate venue for this intervention, and the article's contribution should be read alongside a resurgent scholarly conversation about developmental states and green industrial policy that has gained new momentum in the wake of the United States Inflation Reduction Act and similar subsidy-intensive industrial strategies in the European Union and South Korea. What distinguishes China's approach, and what this article helps to clarify, is the degree to which the state retains direct control over both the commanding heights of the energy system and the institutional architecture through which market signals are filtered and interpreted. This creates a governance configuration that is simultaneously more flexible in some respects — capable of deploying large-scale investment at speed — and more opaque in others, with accountability mechanisms that do not conform to the transparency and stakeholder participation norms that characterize climate governance discourse in OECD contexts.
Looking forward, the trajectories identified in this article carry important implications for both practitioners and researchers working on the global energy transition and development cooperation. China's 2030 carbon peak and 2060 neutrality targets remain the organizing principles of its climate policy architecture, but achieving them will require navigating the political economy of coal-dependent regions, managing the social disruption of industrial restructuring, and building market institutions capable of sustaining price credibility over time. For the international development community, understanding these domestic dynamics is essential to designing engagement strategies that are realistic about what China's governance system can absorb and what kinds of policy dialogue are likely to be productive. For researchers, the article points toward a productive agenda of comparative work examining how different political economies — developmental states, emerging market economies, and aid-recipient nations — are constructing their own climate governance arrangements and what lessons, if any, travel across institutional contexts. The analysis also underscores the need for development finance institutions, including multilateral development banks and bilateral ODA agencies, to develop more sophisticated analytical frameworks for assessing the climate governance quality of partner-country policy environments, moving beyond headline pledge assessments toward a more granular understanding of the institutional dynamics through which decarbonization commitments are — or are not — operationalized in practice.