Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-14
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's climate governance has emerged as one of the most consequential and analytically contested domains in contemporary political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most prolific investor in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a structurally ambiguous position in the global climate order — simultaneously a source of environmental risk and a potential engine of low-carbon transformation. The urgency of this question has intensified in the post-Paris Agreement era, where the adequacy of nationally determined contributions hinges substantially on what China does domestically and how it exports its governance models abroad. Scholarly attention to China's climate policy has grown accordingly, yet much of the existing literature bifurcates into either optimistic accounts of the green energy transition or pessimistic analyses of coal lock-in and authoritarian greenwashing. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, intervenes productively in this debate by centering three analytical axes — transition, governance, and market — that resist easy normative resolution and instead illuminate the structural tensions within China's climate policy architecture.
The concept of transition, as applied to China's energy and industrial system, carries a far more complex meaning than the term implies in standard decarbonization frameworks developed in liberal market economies. China's transition is not simply a shift from carbon-intensive to clean energy sources; it is a politically managed restructuring of state-owned enterprises, local government fiscal interests, and subnational industrial bases that have historically depended on coal for employment and revenue generation. The Chinese Communist Party's dual mandate — maintaining social stability while pursuing ecological civilization — creates institutional friction that shapes policy outcomes in ways external observers frequently underestimate. Provinces in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, whose fiscal architectures are deeply entangled with coal extraction and processing, have historically been able to slow, defer, or reinterpret central climate mandates in ways that the formal policy record obscures. Understanding transition in the Chinese context therefore requires attending to the vertical structure of party-state governance and the persistent bargaining between central ministries and local implementers that defines Chinese policy execution.
The governance dimension of this analysis connects directly to debates within the broader development studies literature about the relationship between state capacity, authoritarian institutions, and environmental policy effectiveness. There is a seductive logic to the argument that China's centralized political system enables rapid mobilization of resources for climate objectives — the speed with which solar panel manufacturing was scaled, the pace of high-speed rail deployment, and the sheer volume of wind capacity installed over the past decade all suggest a developmental state capable of coordinating industrial policy at a scale liberal democracies cannot match. Yet the same institutional configuration generates pathologies that undermine policy coherence. Local officials facing promotion incentives tied to GDP growth have systematically underreported emissions, overstated renewable capacity utilization rates, and continued to approve coal projects under administrative categories designed to evade central scrutiny. The National Development and Reform Commission and the newly restructured Ministry of Ecology and Environment have expanded their regulatory reach, but the enforcement gap between formal regulation and on-the-ground practice remains significant. This governance paradox — high institutional capacity coexisting with endemic implementation deficits — is precisely the kind of structural tension that area-specific scholarship in the Journal of Contemporary Asia is positioned to illuminate.
The third axis, market, introduces a further layer of analytical complexity. China launched a national emissions trading system in 2021, initially covering the power sector, with ambitions to expand to heavy industry, aviation, and chemicals. The design of this system reflects a distinctive hybrid logic: it draws on the formal architecture of carbon pricing mechanisms associated with liberal environmental economics while embedding that architecture within a state-directed industrial policy framework that allocates allowances administratively and adjusts rules in response to political pressures. The result is a carbon market that price signals do not operate in the manner that textbook models predict. Allowance prices have remained subdued relative to levels that would theoretically incentivize meaningful abatement in the power sector, reflecting deliberate government choices to prioritize industrial competitiveness and energy security over carbon price discovery. This does not necessarily render the mechanism ineffective — the act of regulatory enrollment, data disclosure, and MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) capacity-building creates institutional infrastructure that could support more ambitious policy in future periods — but it does challenge the assumption that market mechanisms, once established, generate their own momentum toward decarbonization. For researchers and practitioners working in the ODA and development finance space, this carries important implications: climate finance conditionalities that assume market-based price signals will drive behavior in recipient countries may be poorly calibrated to contexts where state-mediated industrial governance remains dominant.
The broader regional and global significance of China's climate policy trajectory extends well beyond its domestic emissions profile. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and the operations of Chinese development finance institutions — principally the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China — China has functioned as a major exporter of energy infrastructure to developing economies across South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The gradual greening of Chinese overseas finance, marked by the 2021 announcement that China would cease building new coal-fired power plants abroad, represents a potentially significant shift in the political economy of global energy transition. Whether this commitment translates into substantive changes in portfolio composition or functions primarily as reputational management remains an active empirical question. Development researchers working on ODA effectiveness and climate finance additionality should attend carefully to the gap between announced policy and disbursement patterns, as the institutional interests within Chinese finance institutions do not necessarily align with stated governmental commitments.
Looking forward, the analytical framework deployed in this article — disaggregating China's climate policy into its transitional, governance, and market dimensions — offers a methodological template that has direct relevance for scholars studying climate governance in other large emerging economies. Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa all face analogous structural challenges: subnational political economies resistant to rapid decarbonization, institutional configurations that mediate between central mandates and local implementation, and hybrid market mechanisms that embed price signals within developmental state frameworks. The risk in the comparative literature is that China becomes either a model to be emulated or a cautionary tale to be avoided, when the more analytically productive approach is to treat it as a case study in the specific institutional forms through which developmental states navigate the tension between growth imperatives and ecological constraints. For the practitioners and policymakers engaged in climate finance, capacity building, and green transition support in developing economies, this scholarship serves as a reminder that governance context is not a background condition to be acknowledged in passing but the central determinant of whether climate commitments generate real-world emissions reductions. The trajectory of China's climate policy in the years ahead will be shaped not primarily by the ambition of its formal targets but by the institutional politics of implementation — a lesson with universal relevance for the global community of researchers, donors, and development practitioners committed to a meaningful low-carbon transition.