Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-08
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China manages its climate transition has emerged as one of the defining governance challenges of the twenty-first century, with consequences that extend far beyond its borders. As the world's single largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most prolific investor in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a contradictory but pivotal position in global climate politics. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a moment of acute analytical need. Policymakers, development practitioners, and scholars engaged with ODA, South-South cooperation, and the political economy of the Global South must grapple with what China's domestic climate trajectory means for international norms, financing architectures, and the broader project of sustainable development. The urgency is compounded by the structural tensions inherent in China's development model, where coal-dependent provincial economies, state-owned enterprise interests, and ambitious decarbonization pledges coexist in uneasy equilibrium.
At the heart of the analytical framework suggested by the article's three-part framing — transition, governance, and market — lies a recognition that China's climate engagement cannot be understood through any single explanatory lens. The transition dimension refers not merely to the technological shift from fossil fuels to renewables, but to the more fundamental restructuring of China's political economy, including the redistribution of industrial subsidies, the retraining of workforces in coal-dependent regions, and the reorientation of state-owned banks toward green finance. China's formal commitment to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 — announced in September 2020 — represents a significant policy signal, but the governance mechanisms through which these targets are to be achieved remain contested and unevenly implemented. Provincial governments, which retain substantial autonomy in industrial and energy policy, have historically resisted central mandates that threaten local economic output. This creates a principal-agent problem of considerable scale: the central state articulates ambitious climate goals while local implementation remains contingent on political incentives that do not always align with decarbonization priorities.
The governance dimension of the article's framing connects directly to broader debates in the comparative politics literature about authoritarian environmentalism. Scholars have long debated whether centralized, non-democratic systems possess structural advantages in implementing long-horizon climate policy — the argument being that insulation from short electoral cycles enables more credible commitment to costly transitions. China's experience complicates this thesis. While the central government has demonstrated the capacity to rapidly deploy solar and wind capacity at scale, often outpacing liberal democracies in sheer installation volume, the command-and-control mechanisms that drive such deployment have also produced perverse outcomes: overcapacity in solar manufacturing, grid integration failures, and politically motivated target-setting that distorts resource allocation. The article's focus on governance is therefore significant precisely because it foregrounds the institutional complexity beneath what is often portrayed as a monolithic state actor. Understanding how different ministries, regulatory bodies, and subnational governments negotiate climate policy implementation is essential for any realistic assessment of whether China's climate commitments are credible instruments or aspirational declarations.
The market dimension adds a third layer of analytical importance, particularly in light of China's national carbon Emissions Trading System, which was launched in 2021 and has since become the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions. The introduction of market mechanisms into Chinese environmental governance represents a significant ideological and institutional experiment, one that sits in tension with the planning instincts of the Chinese developmental state. Carbon markets require credible price signals, robust monitoring and verification systems, and a degree of regulatory independence that is structurally difficult to sustain in a political system where economic growth targets frequently override environmental enforcement. Early analyses of China's ETS have noted the prevalence of free allowance allocation and the comparatively low carbon price that has resulted, raising questions about whether the market mechanism is functioning as a genuine decarbonization instrument or primarily as a symbolic gesture toward international audiences. For researchers focused on development finance and ODA, these questions are not merely technical: the credibility of China's domestic market mechanisms has direct implications for the conditions attached to Chinese green finance flowing to developing countries under the Belt and Road Initiative and related South-South cooperation frameworks.
Looking forward, the significance of this article extends to the international development research community in several ways. China's climate transition is generating new forms of South-South climate cooperation, including concessional financing for renewable infrastructure, technology transfer agreements, and joint research initiatives, that are reshaping the traditional ODA architecture dominated by OECD-DAC donors. Development scholars need sophisticated accounts of Chinese climate governance not only to assess environmental outcomes but to understand the political economy logics that determine which countries receive Chinese green investment, on what terms, and with what conditionalities. As multilateral climate finance under the UNFCCC framework remains chronically underfunded relative to the scale of need in low-income and climate-vulnerable countries, the role China plays as a bilateral climate financier will become increasingly consequential. Future research should examine how China's domestic governance tensions — between central and local, state and market, growth and decarbonization — are exported or translated into its international climate engagements, and how recipient governments and civil societies in the Global South are positioned to negotiate the terms of that engagement. The analytical framework offered by this article provides a valuable starting point for that necessarily interdisciplinary inquiry.