Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-04
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The publication of a focused scholarly examination of China's climate policy in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment of profound consequence for global environmental governance. China occupies a paradoxical position in the international climate order: it is simultaneously the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the leading manufacturer and deployer of renewable energy technologies, and the architect of a domestic governance model that defies easy categorization within the liberal institutional frameworks that have historically dominated climate diplomacy. Understanding how China navigates the contradictions between its developmental imperatives, its authoritarian governance structures, and its increasingly ambitious climate commitments is not merely an academic exercise. It is essential for anyone engaged in international development cooperation, multilateral environmental agreements, or the political economy of the energy transition in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.
At the center of scholarly inquiry into China's climate policy lies the question of how the Chinese state has attempted to reconcile rapid industrialization with the demands of decarbonization. The governance architecture China has developed is notable for its layered complexity: central directives issued through five-year plans and national carbon reduction targets coexist with significant implementation authority delegated to provincial and local governments, whose incentive structures have historically favored economic output over environmental compliance. This multi-level governance tension has produced a distinctive pattern in which policy ambition at the center frequently diverges from enforcement outcomes at the periphery. The literature on Chinese environmental governance has long grappled with this gap, and what makes recent policy evolution analytically interesting is the degree to which the central state has sought to close it through a combination of regulatory tightening, cadre evaluation reforms, and the development of market-based instruments. The introduction and gradual expansion of China's national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), launched in 2021 and currently the world's largest by coverage of emissions, represents the most visible of these efforts to embed climate governance within market-price signals rather than relying exclusively on command-and-control mechanisms.
The relationship between state authority and market mechanism in China's climate governance framework has attracted sustained scholarly attention precisely because it challenges conventional assumptions about the political preconditions for effective carbon pricing. In standard liberal political economy accounts, credible carbon markets require independent regulatory agencies, transparent price discovery, and rule of law protections that insulate market participants from arbitrary state intervention. China's ETS operates under none of these conditions in the classical sense, and yet the system has persisted and expanded, suggesting that alternative institutional arrangements may be capable of delivering some of the allocative functions attributed to market mechanisms even in the absence of liberal institutional prerequisites. This finding, if substantiated through rigorous empirical analysis, carries significant implications for development policy in middle-income countries with authoritarian or hybrid governance systems, many of which are under growing pressure from bilateral and multilateral donors to adopt carbon pricing as a condition of climate finance. The Chinese experience complicates a one-size-fits-all normative template and demands more contextually grounded institutional analysis.
The regional and global significance of China's climate policy trajectory extends well beyond its domestic emissions profile. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and its associated financing instruments, China has exported energy infrastructure — including, controversially, coal-fired power plants — to dozens of developing countries across South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. The gradual greening of BRI commitments announced since 2021, including pledges to cease financing overseas coal projects, represents a meaningful shift in China's external climate posture, though the implementation record remains uneven and the counterfactual impact difficult to assess given the withdrawal of some Western lenders from fossil fuel project finance. For ODA practitioners and researchers at institutions focused on civil society and development, this dynamic raises critical questions about the governance standards attached to Chinese climate-linked finance, the degree to which recipient country civil society actors can engage meaningfully with project planning and environmental impact assessment processes, and whether the comparative absence of political conditionality in Chinese development lending produces better or worse developmental and environmental outcomes in practice. These are questions that require careful empirical disaggregation rather than ideologically predetermined conclusions.
Looking forward, several intersecting pressures will shape the trajectory of China's climate governance in ways that researchers and practitioners alike must track closely. The impending full deployment of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism by the European Union creates a structural economic incentive for China to accelerate the credibility and stringency of its domestic carbon pricing regime in order to protect the competitive position of Chinese exports in European markets. This external pressure from trade policy may prove more immediately consequential for the design of China's ETS than domestic environmental advocacy, itself operating under severe constraints in the current political environment. Meanwhile, the rapid cost decline of solar photovoltaic and battery storage technologies — sectors in which Chinese manufacturers hold commanding global market shares — is reshaping the political economy of the energy transition in ways that may reduce the short-term costs of ambitious decarbonization commitments, potentially enabling the Chinese state to announce more aggressive near-term targets without triggering the industrial opposition that has historically constrained climate ambition in democratic polities. For scholars working in the Asian political economy tradition, the interplay between industrial policy, climate governance, and geopolitical competition over clean technology supply chains now constitutes one of the most consequential research frontiers of the decade, and rigorous peer-reviewed contributions that bring together comparative political economy, environmental governance theory, and area studies expertise serve an indispensable function in illuminating a process whose outcomes will define the parameters of global development for generations.