Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-02
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 dynamics in contemporary global politics. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest installer of renewable energy capacity, China occupies a paradoxical but pivotal position in the international climate architecture. The country's policy choices ripple outward — shaping the pace of global decarbonization, reconfiguring trade flows in clean energy technologies, and redefining what state-led industrial policy can achieve under twenty-first century conditions. Against a backdrop of intensifying climate diplomacy, rising geopolitical competition between major powers, and mounting pressure from developing nations for equitable climate finance, scholarly attention to the internal logic of China's climate governance has never been more necessary or more urgent. Work appearing in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on this theme engages directly with these stakes, situating China's evolving climate policy within the frameworks of political economy and governance theory that the field demands.
Central to the analytical contribution of this line of inquiry is an examination of the tension between transition imperatives and governance capacity. China's climate ambitions — most prominently the dual carbon goals of peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 — were announced not as aspirational rhetoric but as binding national targets embedded in successive Five-Year Plans. Yet translating these macro-level commitments into coherent subnational implementation has proven genuinely difficult. Provincial governments historically have operated with considerable autonomy in energy and industrial planning, and many retain deep structural dependencies on coal, heavy industry, and carbon-intensive manufacturing. The governance challenge, therefore, is not simply technical — it is deeply political, involving the management of competing interests across levels of the party-state apparatus. Analysis that takes seriously the role of institutional fragmentation, vertical principal-agent problems, and local political economies contributes meaningfully to understanding why China's climate trajectory remains uneven even as its headline statistics on renewable deployment continue to impress.
The market dimension of the article's framing is equally significant. China's national carbon emissions trading system (ETS), launched in 2021 and now the largest in the world by volume of covered emissions, represents an extraordinary experiment in using price signals to drive decarbonization across the power sector. Yet scholars have been right to note the system's structural limitations: initial allocation methodologies based on intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps, low carbon prices relative to abatement costs, limited sectoral coverage, and persistent concerns about data quality and verification. The relationship between market mechanisms and command-and-control instruments in China's climate governance reveals something theoretically important — that hybrid governance arrangements, combining state directive with market incentive, do not reduce to a simple narrative of either market liberalization or statist control. China's approach is better understood as a form of adaptive authoritarianism applied to environmental governance, in which the party-state selectively deploys market instruments as tools of policy implementation while retaining ultimate authority over the parameters within which markets operate. This has significant implications for comparative climate governance scholarship, suggesting that the efficacy of carbon markets cannot be divorced from the broader political economy in which they are embedded.
These domestic governance questions connect directly to broader patterns in Asia's political economy and in global ODA and climate finance. China's Belt and Road Initiative has served as a vehicle not only for infrastructure investment but also for the export of energy development models — and over the course of the past decade, significant pressure from civil society organizations, recipient governments, and multilateral institutions has contributed to a measurable shift in BRI energy portfolios away from coal toward renewable and cleaner energy projects. This shift illustrates the complex feedback loops between China's domestic climate transition and its international development finance posture. The country's role as both a major provider of South-South development cooperation and a state with its own substantial development challenges complicates straightforward narratives about China as climate laggard or climate leader. Scholarship that situates China's climate governance within these international entanglements contributes to a more textured understanding of how rising powers navigate the intersection of national interest, global norm diffusion, and developmental legitimacy.
For practitioners working in development cooperation, climate finance, or multilateral environmental governance, the policy implications that flow from this analysis are considerable. The architecture of international climate finance — including mechanisms under the UNFCCC, the Green Climate Fund, and bilateral ODA channels — increasingly needs to grapple with China's dual identity as a significant provider and a country with legitimate claims to support for its own transition. The question of how to engage China constructively within international climate governance frameworks, without either dismissing the genuine complexity of its domestic constraints or exempting it from accountability norms applied to other major economies, represents one of the defining diplomatic challenges of the coming decade. For researchers, the article points toward productive avenues of inquiry: longitudinal analysis of subnational variation in ETS compliance, comparative study of carbon market design across Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, and examination of how civil society actors — operating within the considerable constraints of China's domestic political environment — nonetheless influence the texture of climate policy implementation. The field of contemporary Asian studies has much to gain from sustained, empirically grounded engagement with what is, by any measure, the most consequential national climate experiment of our era, and scholarly contributions that bridge political economy, governance theory, and environmental policy represent precisely the kind of interdisciplinary rigor the moment demands.