Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-07
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating pace of climate change has transformed it from an environmental concern into a defining variable of twenty-first-century geopolitics, development finance, and state-market relations. Nowhere is this transformation more consequential than in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy capacity. As international pressure mounts through frameworks like the Paris Agreement, the Global Stocktake mechanism, and the evolving architecture of climate-related official development assistance, the question of how China governs its own energy and industrial transition has taken on significance well beyond its borders. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" enters this debate at a particularly critical juncture — one in which China's domestic policy choices ripple outward to shape global supply chains, carbon markets, and the strategic calculations of developing nations seeking partners for green investment. Understanding the internal logic of China's climate governance is therefore not merely an academic exercise but a prerequisite for any serious engagement with the political economy of the global energy transition.
At the heart of the analytical framework that a study of this kind must navigate is the tension between China's centralized party-state apparatus and the increasingly market-oriented instruments through which climate objectives are pursued. China's formal climate commitments — including the pledge to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 — are articulated through top-down national planning cycles, most visibly the Five-Year Plans, which set binding targets for energy intensity, renewable capacity, and emissions trading. Yet the implementation of these targets depends heavily on subnational governments, state-owned enterprises, and a growing private green-tech sector whose interests do not always align neatly with central directives. The governance challenge is therefore one of vertical coordination across administrative levels and horizontal coordination across ministries and industrial actors with distinct political incentives. The article's framing of China's climate policy through the triple lens of transition, governance, and market suggests a recognition that none of these dimensions can be analytically isolated: the speed and character of China's energy transition is a product of specific governance arrangements that are themselves being reshaped by the market forces they have helped to create.
The concept of "transition" as applied to China's climate landscape carries multiple valences that any serious analysis must disentangle. There is, first, the structural economic transition away from heavy industry and coal-intensive manufacturing that has been underway since the mid-2000s, driven as much by concerns over industrial overcapacity and local air pollution as by carbon reduction per se. Second, there is the technological transition toward solar photovoltaics, wind power, electric vehicles, and battery storage — sectors in which Chinese firms have achieved dominant global market positions through a combination of state subsidy, massive domestic demand, and competitive manufacturing ecosystems. Third, and perhaps most politically sensitive, is the transitional challenge facing coal-dependent regions and workers whose livelihoods are bound up with the fossil fuel economy. This social dimension of transition has become increasingly salient in Chinese policy discourse as planners seek to avoid the kind of regional deindustrialization and political instability that have accompanied energy transitions in other contexts. The article's engagement with these overlapping transition processes likely illuminates how Beijing attempts to manage trade-offs between decarbonization speed, regional equity, and industrial competitiveness — a balancing act that has direct relevance for policymakers in other rapidly industrializing economies watching China's approach with a mixture of admiration and wariness.
From the perspective of global development and ODA scholarship, China's climate governance model carries important comparative implications. The Chinese state has deployed a distinctive set of policy instruments — including feed-in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards, carbon emission trading schemes, and green bonds — that blend market mechanisms with strong administrative direction. The national carbon market launched in 2021, covering the power sector and now being expanded to additional industries, represents one of the most ambitious emissions trading experiments in the world, though its credibility has been tested by data integrity concerns and the political pressures that discourage stringent enforcement against powerful state enterprises. Internationally, China's role as a financier of energy infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative adds another layer of complexity: Beijing has publicly committed to ending overseas financing of coal-fired power plants while scaling up support for clean energy projects, yet the implementation of these pledges is mediated by the same governance tensions visible in domestic policy. For recipient countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, China's evolving climate finance stance intersects directly with questions of debt sustainability, technology transfer conditionality, and the terms on which green infrastructure investments are structured.
Looking forward, the analytical significance of work on China's climate governance extends well beyond the bilateral or regional frame. As the international community debates the reform of multilateral climate finance — including the operationalization of the new collective quantified goal on climate finance agreed at COP29 — China's positioning as both a major emitter and an increasingly significant provider of South-South climate cooperation creates genuine ambiguity about its role in the emerging green financial architecture. Researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of ODA, civil society, and political economy will need to grapple with a China that defies easy categorization as donor, recipient, or peer: a state that has successfully mobilized domestic market forces for climate objectives while remaining deeply resistant to the transparency and accountability norms that underpin multilateral development institutions. The study of China's climate policy trajectory thus serves as a productive site for interrogating broader questions about the relationship between authoritarian governance and environmental ambition, the conditions under which market mechanisms generate genuine decarbonization rather than green-washing, and the extent to which China's model offers transferable lessons or constitutes a historically specific configuration unlikely to be replicated elsewhere. For an institute concerned with the political economy of development and the evolving landscape of global civil society, these questions will only grow in urgency as the window for meaningful climate action narrows and the geopolitical stakes of the green transition continue to rise.