Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-03
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate governance, political economy, and market development in contemporary China represents one of the most consequential and contested arenas in global environmental politics. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a structurally paradoxical position in the international climate order — one that conventional frameworks drawn from liberal institutionalism or developmental state theory struggle to fully accommodate. Scholarly attention to how China navigates the internal tensions of its climate commitments, balancing state-led industrial policy with nascent market mechanisms while managing subnational governance fragmentation, has never been more urgent. The article under review, appearing in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages this terrain at a moment when China's dual carbon targets — carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — have moved from aspirational rhetoric to operational planning, reshaping not only domestic policy architecture but also global development finance and South-South climate cooperation frameworks.
Understanding China's climate governance requires grappling with the peculiarity of its institutional design. Unlike the regulatory agencies of advanced industrial democracies, China's climate governance apparatus is embedded within a layered party-state structure in which ministerial authority, provincial implementation discretion, and central planning mandates interact in often contradictory ways. The National Development and Reform Commission, subsequently superseded in part by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, has historically held primary authority over carbon accounting and emissions trading design, but enforcement capacity has remained chronically uneven across provincial jurisdictions. This unevenness is not merely an administrative deficiency; it reflects deeper political economy dynamics in which local governments, dependent on energy-intensive industries for revenue and employment, face structural incentives to underreport emissions and resist rapid decarbonization. The transition framework explored in this article therefore engages not simply with the technical parameters of energy system change but with the political settlements that determine who bears adjustment costs and on what timeline — a fundamentally distributional question that climate governance scholarship has often underweighted relative to its focus on aggregate mitigation ambition.
The development of China's national emissions trading scheme (ETS), launched in its compliance phase in 2021, constitutes perhaps the most analytically significant institutional innovation in Chinese climate governance in the past decade. Beginning with the power sector and designed to expand to steel, cement, aluminum, and other heavy industries, the ETS represents an attempt to harness market price signals to drive decarbonization within a system that retains strong state preferences for managed transitions and industrial policy continuity. The scheme's architecture — based on intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps, and initially with free allocation rather than auctioning — reflects deliberate calibration toward minimizing sectoral disruption during a period of ongoing industrial restructuring. Critics from within the environmental economics tradition have observed that this design limits the carbon price signal's effectiveness, while defenders argue that institutional legitimacy and compliance infrastructure must be built incrementally in a context where carbon markets are genuinely novel governance instruments. The political economy logic here is instructive: market mechanisms in China are not imported wholesale from neoliberal templates but are adapted, constrained, and instrumentalized within a state-directed developmental logic that the article situates within broader debates about the distinctiveness of China's regulatory capitalism.
The article's engagement with transition politics also connects to larger debates in development studies and ODA research about the financing of green transitions in emerging economies. China's own experience with rapid buildout of solar, wind, and battery manufacturing capacity has been substantially state-financed, raising questions about the applicability of models premised on private capital mobilization to economies with weaker state balance sheets. At the same time, China's role as a creditor and infrastructure developer across the Global South through Belt and Road Initiative financing has come under intensifying scrutiny regarding the carbon intensity of funded projects and the degree to which Chinese development finance institutions are internalizing climate conditionality. The Journal of Contemporary Asia has over recent years published a growing body of work examining these South-South dimensions, situating China not only as a domestic climate actor but as a structural force shaping the development trajectories of coal-dependent partner economies from Indonesia to sub-Saharan Africa. Understanding the internal governance and market logic of Chinese climate policy is therefore prerequisite to assessing its external projection — a linkage that the framing of this article as political economy analysis, rather than technical policy review, is well positioned to illuminate.
From the standpoint of policy significance, the article's contribution lies in its insistence that climate governance in China cannot be analytically decoupled from questions of state capacity, industrial restructuring, and distributional politics. For practitioners engaged in climate finance, bilateral development cooperation, or multilateral climate negotiations, this has direct operational implications. Engagement strategies premised on the assumption that China's climate commitments will translate smoothly into administrative compliance underestimate the friction generated by provincial interests, state-owned enterprise lobbying, and the genuine developmental imperatives facing communities dependent on fossil fuel industries. Conversely, analyses that treat China's climate governance as purely performative, driven by diplomatic signaling rather than substantive policy change, fail to account for the scale and pace of energy system transformation already underway. The article thus performs an important corrective function, calling for more granular, governance-sensitive analysis that neither overstates nor dismisses the depth of China's climate transition.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this work points toward several productive lines of inquiry for scholars and practitioners. First, comparative analysis of China's ETS development against analogous efforts in South Korea, the European Union, and proposed schemes in Vietnam and Indonesia would help disentangle generic challenges of carbon market institution-building from features specific to China's political economy. Second, the subnational dimension of Chinese climate governance — provincial variation in renewable energy deployment, carbon accounting integrity, and industrial phase-out timelines — deserves sustained attention as the locus where national ambition meets implementation reality. Third, as China's climate finance institutions, including the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank, revise their green lending criteria, understanding the domestic governance logic that drives these revisions is essential for development partners seeking to engage constructively rather than merely critically. The article reviewed here, by anchoring its analysis in the political economy of transition rather than the technical parameters of emissions reduction, helps establish the conceptual vocabulary necessary for these next-generation research questions — a contribution of genuine importance to the field at a moment when the stakes of understanding China's climate trajectory extend well beyond its own borders.