Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-11
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China governs its energy and climate transition has become one of the most consequential policy questions of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of its most ambitious deployers of renewable energy, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate politics. The significance of this paradox extends well beyond the country's borders: the pace and character of China's decarbonization trajectory will determine whether the global community can realistically meet the temperature targets established under the Paris Agreement. A focused analysis of how China's climate governance architecture operates — across the competing registers of state authority, market mechanisms, and transitional politics — is therefore not merely an academic exercise but a matter of urgent practical consequence for policymakers, development institutions, and civil society actors working across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
At the heart of China's climate governance framework lies a set of commitments that are as structurally ambitious as they are politically complex. The dual carbon goals — achieving peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — were announced by President Xi Jinping in 2020 and have since been institutionalized across multiple layers of state planning. What the Journal of Contemporary Asia article under review engages with, through the lens of transition, governance, and market, is the interior architecture of this commitment: the question not simply of what China has pledged, but of how those pledges are actually being translated into governance instruments, industrial transformation, and market-based incentive structures. This is where the analytical richness of the contribution lies, because the distance between declaratory climate ambition and implemented policy is precisely the terrain on which China's credibility as a climate actor is contested. The central tension is that China's political economy remains deeply shaped by coal-dependent industrial interests, provincial revenue structures tied to fossil fuel extraction, and a planning apparatus that has long prioritized economic growth metrics over environmental externalities.
The governance dimension of China's climate transition is particularly illuminating in this regard. China's approach to climate policy does not conform neatly to either the decentralized market liberal model characteristic of many OECD economies, nor to the simple top-down command model that Western commentary sometimes attributes to the Chinese state. Instead, what emerges from close analysis is a layered and often contested governance structure in which the central government sets ambitious targets while local governments retain enormous discretionary authority over implementation. Provincial and municipal officials face competing pressures: on one hand, they are subject to evaluation systems that increasingly incorporate environmental performance indicators; on the other, they are responsible for maintaining local employment, managing social stability, and sustaining the fiscal revenues that fund public services. This creates systematic implementation gaps, particularly in resource-dependent regions where the political costs of rapid coal phase-down are acutely felt. The article's engagement with governance is significant because it refuses the temptation to treat China's climate ambition as either purely performative or uniformly effective — it foregrounds the friction between central ambition and local political economy as constitutive of what Chinese climate governance actually is.
The market dimension introduces a further layer of analytical complexity. China launched its national carbon trading scheme in 2021, initially covering the power sector and subsequently expanding its scope. In principle, the emissions trading system (ETS) represents a market-based convergence between environmental targets and economic rationality, creating price signals that incentivize decarbonization across covered industries. In practice, however, the early operation of the Chinese ETS has revealed significant structural constraints: allowance allocation based on intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps has limited the stringency of the carbon price signal, free allocation to covered entities has reduced the redistributive and revenue-generating potential of the system, and data quality challenges have raised questions about the integrity of reported emissions. These market design features are not merely technical deficiencies but reflect underlying political compromises within China's industrial governance. The relationship between market mechanisms and state authority in Chinese climate policy is thus one of managed instrumentalization — markets are deployed to achieve state objectives, but only insofar as they do not challenge the structural interests embedded in China's political economy. Understanding this dynamic is essential for any comparative analysis of carbon market development across Asia, where other emerging economies are contemplating similar instruments under very different governance conditions.
The broader regional significance of China's climate transition cannot be understated. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and its affiliated green finance frameworks, China exports not only capital but governance models and technological systems to partner countries across Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa. The degree to which China's own domestic climate governance evolves will shape the environmental footprint of this infrastructure export regime. If China's transition toward cleaner energy at home is accompanied by a parallel greening of its overseas investment portfolio — a trajectory that remains contested and uneven — the implications for ODA flows, development finance architecture, and civil society engagement in recipient countries are profound. Conversely, if the gap between domestic climate rhetoric and practice remains wide, or if overseas investments continue to lock partner economies into carbon-intensive pathways, the development consequences will be severe and long-lasting. For scholars and practitioners working within the ODA and development finance space, this article's analytical framework offers a methodologically valuable template for examining the governance-market interface in climate policy, one that can be adapted to comparative analysis across Asian middle-income economies navigating similar transitional pressures.
Looking forward, the research and policy significance of rigorous work on China's climate governance extends across several emerging frontiers. The relationship between climate transition and geopolitical repositioning deserves sustained attention: as the United States and European Union develop carbon border adjustment mechanisms, the strategic calculus around China's climate commitments becomes increasingly entangled with trade and technology competition. Similarly, the role of domestic civil society and research institutions in shaping China's climate policy — constrained but not absent — warrants closer comparative scrutiny, particularly in relation to how policy knowledge is produced, circulated, and contested within authoritarian governance contexts. For development researchers, the most pressing analytical frontier may be the question of how China's transition will affect global commodity markets, energy access, and industrial policy space in lower-income countries that have relied on Chinese technology transfer and finance. The article reviewed here, situated within the Journal of Contemporary Asia's tradition of rigorous political economy scholarship, contributes to these conversations by insisting that China's climate governance be understood from within — as a contested, multi-scalar process shaped by real institutional constraints — rather than reduced to either propaganda or exceptional state capacity. That insistence on analytical complexity is precisely what the field requires as it confronts the governance challenges of a rapidly changing climate and a shifting global order.