Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-12
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate policy, state governance, and market development in China has emerged as one of the most consequential research frontiers in contemporary political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the second-largest economy, China's trajectory on climate change will determine in substantial measure whether international targets such as those codified in the Paris Agreement remain achievable. Yet understanding China's climate governance requires moving beyond headline announcements — President Xi Jinping's 2020 pledges of peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — to examine the institutional architectures, bureaucratic incentive structures, and market instruments through which policy ambitions are translated, or fail to be translated, into material outcomes. It is precisely this gap between aspiration and implementation that scholarship published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia increasingly seeks to illuminate, and the article under discussion contributes to that effort by situating China's climate trajectory within the intertwined dynamics of political transition, administrative governance, and emerging carbon markets.
The analytical core of work in this vein typically centers on what scholars of Chinese political economy have termed the "governance paradox" of climate policy: the Chinese state possesses extraordinary mobilization capacity and has demonstrated a willingness to deploy centralized authority for environmental ends, yet the very fragmentation of regulatory authority across ministries, provincial governments, and state-owned enterprises creates persistent implementation gaps. China's Emissions Trading System (ETS), launched nationally in 2021 after a decade of regional pilots, exemplifies this paradox in miniature. On paper it represents the world's largest carbon market by coverage volume, incorporating the power sector and eventually expected to expand across heavy industry. In practice, the initial phases were characterized by lax enforcement, the allocation of overly generous carbon allowances reflecting the political weight of energy incumbents, and limited price discovery that dampened the market signal carbon pricing is theoretically designed to deliver. The governance architecture of the ETS — with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment responsible for policy while verification and compliance rely on local government networks with their own growth mandates — reproduces at the sectoral level the center-local tensions that have historically complicated Chinese environmental regulation. Analysis of this institutional configuration reveals not a unified state actor rationally optimizing climate outcomes, but a negotiated order in which different bureaucratic and commercial interests shape the policy in ways that diverge substantially from the formal design.
The "transition" dimension of the article's framework points toward a broader concern in the comparative political economy literature: the political economy of decarbonization in a developmental state context. China's growth model has been built, in significant part, on carbon-intensive heavy industry, coal-fired power, and the infrastructure expansion associated with urbanization at historically unprecedented scale. The transition away from this model involves not only technological substitution but the redistribution of economic rents, the management of stranded assets in coal and steel, and the retraining or redeployment of workforces in affected regions. China's rustbelt provinces — Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang — face structural adjustment pressures analogous to those that reshaped deindustrializing regions in Western Europe and North America, yet within a political context that simultaneously demands social stability and rapid decarbonization. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) adds an international dimension to this transition question: as China has faced pressure to green its overseas finance and has announced commitments to no longer build new coal-fired power plants abroad, the question of whether Chinese development finance instruments can become genuine vectors for low-carbon transition in recipient countries — or whether such commitments remain largely rhetorical — has become central to global ODA discourse. For researchers and practitioners working on development finance, the evolution of China's climate governance posture is not merely a domestic matter but a determinant of the available climate finance architecture for much of the Global South.
The market dimension of the article's framing connects to one of the deepest tensions in contemporary Chinese political economy: the role of market mechanisms within a state that maintains directive control over resource allocation and retains the capacity to override market signals when they conflict with political priorities. China's approach to green finance — encompassing green bonds, green credit guidelines, and the expanding role of the People's Bank of China in directing capital toward low-carbon sectors — reflects a model of state-steered market development that differs structurally from the market-led approaches favored in OECD economies. Whether this model generates more rapid deployment of renewable energy capacity (and China's extraordinary growth in solar and wind installation suggests it can) while sacrificing the allocative efficiency that pure market signals would theoretically achieve is an empirical question with significant implications for how development agencies and international financial institutions engage with Chinese approaches. The article's engagement with governance mechanisms that mediate between state directives and market instruments thus has direct relevance for understanding the emerging architecture of climate finance in the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
For policy researchers and ODA practitioners, the significance of this scholarship lies partly in its empirical contributions and partly in its methodological orientation. By insisting on the specificity of Chinese institutional configurations rather than treating the country as a unitary actor, work in this tradition resists both the exceptionalist framing that renders China's approach incomprehensible to external analysts and the convergence thesis that assumes Chinese climate governance will progressively approximate Western regulatory models. The implications for international climate cooperation are concrete: engagement strategies that focus on ministry-to-ministry technical exchange, carbon market linkage mechanisms, or conditionality in development finance must reckon with the actual distribution of authority and interest within the Chinese system, not with an idealized version of how that system operates. Civil society dimensions — largely constrained within China's domestic context but active at the margins through think tanks, research institutes, and international NGO partnerships — remain an underexplored vector through which ideas and norms diffuse into Chinese climate governance, and this represents a productive frontier for future scholarship.
Looking forward, China's climate governance will unfold against a backdrop of intensifying geopolitical competition that complicates the cooperative frameworks on which effective global climate action depends. The decoupling pressures in technology supply chains — particularly in solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, where Chinese manufacturers hold dominant positions — create paradoxes in which Western climate ambitions depend on Chinese industrial capacity while Western industrial policy simultaneously seeks to reduce that dependence. For Asia-focused scholars and practitioners, the question of how regional climate cooperation can be structured in ways that leverage China's deployment capacity without reproducing dependency relationships or foreclosing technological diversification represents a research agenda with urgent real-world stakes. The article's contribution, by grounding analysis in the institutional specificities of Chinese governance and market development, helps equip that broader conversation with the empirical precision it requires.