Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-06
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating urgency of the global climate crisis has placed China at the center of international attention, not merely as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but as a state whose domestic policy architecture will substantially determine whether humanity can meet the targets established under the Paris Agreement. China's carbon trajectory is inseparable from the political economy of its development model, and scholars of governance, international relations, and environmental policy have increasingly recognized that understanding how Beijing navigates the tension between growth imperatives and decarbonization commitments is one of the defining analytical challenges of the contemporary era. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's examination of China's climate policy through the intersecting lenses of transition, governance, and market arrives at a moment when these dynamics are not only academically significant but carry concrete consequences for global climate diplomacy, development finance, and the organization of civil society across the Asia-Pacific.
China's climate governance presents a paradox that resists easy categorization within existing theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, Beijing has demonstrated a capacity for ambitious state-directed industrial policy that has dramatically reshaped global supply chains in solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery storage — often cited as evidence that authoritarian developmental states can mobilize resources for green transition with a speed and scale that liberal democracies struggle to match. On the other hand, the same institutional architecture that enables rapid deployment of political will also generates endemic problems of bureaucratic fragmentation, local government noncompliance, data falsification, and rent-seeking behavior within carbon market mechanisms. The analysis in this article, situated within the Journal of Contemporary Asia's broader intellectual project of interrogating Asian political economy with empirical rigor, engages these contradictions seriously rather than resolving them prematurely in favor of either a celebratory narrative of Chinese green statism or a dismissive account of authoritarian greenwashing. What emerges is a more textured account of how governance capacity, institutional design, and market creation interact within a Leninist party-state that is simultaneously reforming and consolidating its control over economic life.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy is particularly important for understanding the gap between announced ambitions and implemented outcomes. China's dual carbon goals — peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — represent a remarkable commitment given the country's current energy mix, but translating these national targets into sub-national compliance involves navigating a multi-level governance structure in which provincial and municipal governments retain substantial discretionary authority over industrial permitting, land use, and investment approval. Research in this area has consistently documented how local governments, subject to competing pressures of employment maintenance, fiscal revenue generation, and political performance metrics tied to GDP growth, routinely prioritize short-term economic objectives over climate mandates issued from Beijing. The center-local tension is not simply a technical coordination problem amenable to administrative reform; it reflects deeper structural features of China's political economy in which the legitimacy of the party-state remains partially anchored in delivering material prosperity. The article's engagement with this governance problematic connects to a rich literature on developmental state theory, principal-agent problems in authoritarian systems, and the political sociology of environmental regulation in late-industrializing economies.
China's national emissions trading scheme (ETS), launched in 2021 as the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions, represents the most consequential attempt to deploy market mechanisms within this governance context, and its evolution offers important lessons for the comparative study of carbon pricing globally. The ETS began with coverage limited to the power sector and relied on intensity-based benchmarks rather than absolute caps, a design choice that reflects the political constraints of introducing carbon costs in an economy still reliant on coal-fired electricity generation. Analysts have noted that the initial price signals produced by the Chinese ETS have been too weak to drive significant abatement behavior, a finding that raises fundamental questions about whether market instruments can function effectively without the independent regulatory infrastructure, transparent data systems, and civil society monitoring capacity that underpin carbon pricing in jurisdictions such as the European Union. This comparison is instructive not only for understanding China's climate governance but for the broader debate in development economics and ODA policy about the conditions under which market-based environmental instruments are appropriate and effective. Donor agencies and multilateral development banks that have increasingly championed carbon markets as a mechanism for mobilizing climate finance in developing countries need to grapple with the Chinese experience as a data point about the limits of market design divorced from institutional complementarities.
The implications of China's climate policy trajectory extend well beyond its borders through multiple channels that are of direct relevance to practitioners in official development assistance and civil society organizations working on climate and sustainability. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) continues to finance energy infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the greening of BRI finance — increasingly promoted through the concept of a "Green Silk Road" — remains contested terrain between advocates who point to a growing portfolio of renewable energy projects and critics who document the continued financing of coal and gas infrastructure by Chinese policy banks. Civil society organizations in recipient countries have found it difficult to engage with Chinese development finance institutions through the advocacy channels that have been developed, however imperfectly, in relation to World Bank or Asian Development Bank projects, reflecting the absence of equivalent environmental and social safeguard frameworks with accessible grievance mechanisms. Understanding how China's domestic governance of climate policy connects to its external development finance posture is therefore not an academic exercise but a matter of practical urgency for communities affected by BRI projects and for the international organizations seeking to influence Chinese lending norms.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by several intersecting forces that researchers and practitioners should monitor closely. The accelerating cost reduction in clean energy technologies, in which Chinese manufacturers have played a central role, is creating new economic logics that may gradually reduce the political resistance of industrial constituencies to decarbonization. At the same time, the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States introduces new uncertainties into the climate governance landscape, as technology competition, trade restrictions, and the weaponization of supply chain dependencies complicate the multilateral cooperation that effective global climate action ultimately requires. For scholars of Asian political economy and practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the most pressing research agenda involves understanding how China's domestic governance reforms — including efforts to strengthen environmental enforcement, expand civil society participation in environmental impact assessment, and improve the integrity of carbon market data — interact with its international climate diplomacy and its posture as a development finance provider. The article under review makes a valuable contribution to this agenda by situating China's climate policy within the analytical traditions of the Journal of Contemporary Asia, insisting on the primacy of political economy rather than technocratic governance frameworks alone, and reminding readers that the transition to a low-carbon economy in China, as elsewhere, is fundamentally a political process whose outcomes will be determined by the distribution of power, interests, and institutional capacity within and between states.