Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-30
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating urgency of global climate change has thrust the governance architectures of major emitting nations into sharp scholarly and policy focus. China occupies a singular position in this landscape: simultaneously the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, the leading installer of renewable energy capacity, and a state whose climate commitments are structurally entangled with its model of authoritarian developmentalism. As the international community intensifies pressure on all actors to deliver credible decarbonization pathways, questions about how China governs its own energy transition — and what role market mechanisms play within a Leninist party-state — have moved from the periphery to the center of political economy scholarship. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages precisely this nexus: the interaction between state authority, institutional design, and market-based instruments in shaping China's climate trajectory. Understanding this interaction is not merely an academic exercise; it has direct consequences for the viability of global emissions targets, the architecture of South-South development finance, and the future of multilateral climate governance.
At the heart of this work lies a set of arguments that resist the twin temptations of techno-optimism and authoritarian exceptionalism. Scholars working in the tradition of comparative political economy have long debated whether state-capitalist systems possess structural advantages in steering rapid socio-technical transitions — the capacity for long-horizon planning, insulation from electoral cycles, and the ability to mobilize capital at scale through state-owned enterprises and policy banks. China's renewable energy expansion, particularly in solar photovoltaics and wind, appears to lend empirical weight to such claims. Yet the governance of climate policy in China is far more fragmented, contested, and bureaucratically complex than a simple "strong state" narrative would suggest. The article's analysis of transition governance likely illuminates how central mandates interact with subnational implementation — a perennial tension in Chinese administrative history — and how local governments, whose fiscal incentives have historically favored heavy industry, are being repositioned within the new climate regulatory framework. The contradictions embedded in this process are not incidental; they are constitutive of the transition itself.
The market dimension of China's climate governance deserves particular analytical attention. China launched its national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2021, initially covering the power sector and representing the largest carbon market in the world by volume of covered emissions. Yet the trajectory of this instrument has revealed deep tensions between market design imperatives and the political economy of a system in which state-owned enterprises are simultaneously the primary regulated entities and key pillars of regime legitimacy. Permit allocation has remained heavily administrative, price signals have been subdued by comparison with European carbon markets, and the expansion of the ETS to cover additional industrial sectors has proceeded cautiously. The article's framing around "market" as a category within Chinese climate governance invites a theoretically sophisticated reading of what markets mean in this context — not as autonomous price-setting mechanisms embedded in liberal property rights regimes, but as instruments of state steering whose effectiveness is mediated by the broader political economy of enterprise reform, local government finance, and sectoral industrial policy. This is a materially important distinction for scholars seeking to transfer lessons from the Chinese case to other development contexts, including those in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa where Chinese climate finance and technology transfer are increasingly consequential.
The implications of this analysis extend significantly into the domain of overseas development assistance and international climate finance. China's Belt and Road Initiative has been subject to sustained criticism for the carbon intensity of its infrastructure portfolio, and while Beijing has made rhetorical commitments to greening the BRI — including a pledge to cease overseas coal financing announced at the 2021 United Nations General Assembly — the institutionalization of these commitments remains uneven. The domestic governance architecture examined in this article has direct bearing on how Chinese policy banks, state-owned enterprises, and project developers export governance norms through their overseas engagement. If China's domestic ETS remains weakly enforced and if its industrial policy continues to support energy-intensive manufacturing as a component of export competitiveness, these structural features will shape the climate footprint of Chinese-financed infrastructure abroad. For ODA scholars and development practitioners, this creates an imperative to analyze Chinese climate governance not in isolation but as a systemic phenomenon whose domestic and international dimensions are mutually constitutive.
Looking forward, the scholarly and policy significance of work in this vein is likely to grow considerably. China's dual carbon targets — peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — represent commitments of historic magnitude, but their credibility rests on governance reforms that remain incomplete and contested. The tension between transition imperatives and developmental priorities will intensify as China navigates a structural economic slowdown, rising debt burdens at the local government level, and heightened geopolitical competition with Western economies that are increasingly deploying industrial policy instruments to capture clean technology supply chains. For researchers working at the intersection of Asian political economy, climate governance, and international development, the Chinese case offers an indispensable laboratory for examining how authoritarian developmental states manage the contradictions of decarbonizing growth. For practitioners engaged in multilateral climate negotiations, climate finance architecture, and South-South development partnerships, the governance dynamics illuminated by articles such as this one are not background knowledge but operational intelligence. The trajectory of the global energy transition will be determined, in no small measure, by whether the institutional innovations and market mechanisms embedded in China's climate governance can bridge the gap between ambitious targets and the structural inertias of a coal-dependent, state-capitalist political economy. That gap remains wide — and the scholarly work of mapping its contours, as this article undertakes, is among the most consequential intellectual tasks of the present moment.