Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-10
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's climate policy has emerged as one of the most consequential variables in the global effort to manage the ecological crisis of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest producer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a structurally paradoxical position in international climate negotiations and domestic industrial transformation alike. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a critical juncture — a moment when the gap between China's stated commitments under the Paris Agreement framework and the observable pace of its energy transition has drawn increasing scrutiny from scholars, development practitioners, and policymakers across the globe. Understanding how the Chinese state is navigating the intersection of climate ambition, governance architecture, and market mechanism is not merely an academic exercise. It speaks directly to questions about the viability of green industrial policy under authoritarian developmentalism, the credibility of net-zero pledges made by large developing economies, and the terms on which the global south engages with climate finance and Official Development Assistance in the coming decades.
The conceptual framing of "transition, governance, and market" as the article's organizing triplet is analytically productive because it resists both techno-optimist accounts that reduce China's climate trajectory to a story of renewable energy capacity additions and purely political-economy critiques that treat carbon lock-in as structurally inevitable. Transition, in the Chinese context, cannot be understood without reckoning with the entrenched interests of the coal sector — the social employment base it sustains in provinces like Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Guizhou — and the institutional inertia of state-owned energy enterprises whose balance sheets remain deeply invested in fossil infrastructure. Governance, meanwhile, is not a neutral administrative backdrop but the terrain on which competing ministries, local governments, and market regulators contest the pace and distributive consequences of decarbonization. China's top-down target-setting regime, embodied in its Five-Year Plans and the dual carbon goals of peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060, creates performance incentives for local officials that do not always align with the ecological objectives they nominally serve. Market mechanisms, particularly the national Emissions Trading Scheme launched in 2021 and expanded thereafter, represent an attempt to introduce price signals into this governance architecture — yet the ETS has been widely observed to operate at carbon prices far below what economic models suggest would be necessary to drive structural transformation at the required speed.
The broader significance of this article extends well beyond China's domestic policy landscape. China's Belt and Road Initiative has carried Chinese energy finance into dozens of developing countries, and the ecological character of that finance — the extent to which it supports coal or natural gas infrastructure abroad versus renewable alternatives — has become one of the defining debates in the ODA literature. Civil society organizations working at the intersection of development finance and climate justice have documented the ways in which Chinese project finance has often replicated the carbon-intensive growth model even as Beijing articulates a Green Belt and Road vision. The governance tensions within China's climate policy are thus projected outward through its overseas development finance: a state that has not resolved the contradiction between carbon-dependent growth and ecological transition at home is unlikely to systematically enforce a green conditionality abroad. At the same time, it would be analytically incomplete to treat China's international climate footprint as uniformly negative. China has become the dominant global supplier of solar panels, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries — technologies whose diffusion into developing economies is in many respects accelerated by Chinese industrial policy and export capacity. The political economy of China's green industrial transition is therefore inseparable from questions about who controls the supply chains of the low-carbon economy and on what terms developing nations access them.
The policy implications of this scholarship are substantial for both national governments and multilateral institutions engaged in climate finance and development cooperation. For Western donors and multilateral development banks, understanding the internal governance dynamics of China's climate policy is essential to assessing whether pledges made in forums like COP can be treated as credible anchors for collective action or whether they require independent verification mechanisms and complementary international pressure. For developing country governments that are simultaneously recipients of Chinese development finance and participants in their own energy transitions, the Chinese experience offers important lessons about the sequencing of market instruments and regulatory governance — as well as cautionary evidence about the risks of deploying emissions trading systems before the underlying monitoring, reporting, and verification infrastructure is robust. The role of civil society in mediating these processes is also illuminated by this framework: in China, domestic civil society space on environmental advocacy has been tightly constrained, which has shaped the character of environmental governance in ways that differ markedly from the stakeholder engagement models promoted by OECD donors and development finance institutions.
Looking forward, the research agenda that articles of this kind are advancing has significant implications for how the field of development studies theorizes the relationship between state capacity, market design, and ecological transformation. China's climate trajectory will be a critical empirical test case for whether large developing economies can decouple growth from emissions within politically and economically realistic timeframes. For scholars at the intersection of Asian political economy, development finance, and climate governance, the coming decade offers a rare natural experiment: whether the institutional architecture China has constructed — its planning hierarchy, its emissions markets, its green finance regulatory framework — proves capable of navigating what economists call the trilemma of energy security, economic competitiveness, and emissions reduction simultaneously. Practitioners in ODA and civil society organizations working on climate justice should read this literature with attention not merely to what China's policy choices reveal about China, but about the structural constraints and institutional possibilities facing any state that attempts to govern a carbon transition at scale in a world where the costs of climate action and the costs of climate inaction are both politically contested and unevenly distributed.