Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-15
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China governs its energy transition has become one of the most consequential puzzles in contemporary global political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest investor in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position that defies simple characterization as either climate villain or green champion. The stakes of this analytical question extend well beyond China's borders: given that the country accounts for roughly a quarter to a third of global carbon emissions depending on the measurement year and methodology, the structure, pace, and political economy of China's climate governance will effectively determine whether humanity's collective decarbonization ambitions remain achievable within scientifically meaningful timeframes. It is against this backdrop that scholarship examining the intersection of climate policy, state governance architecture, and market mechanism design in China carries exceptional significance for researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners alike.
At the heart of scholarly engagement with China's climate transition lies a fundamental tension between the Chinese party-state's administrative capacities and the market logics that carbon pricing and emissions trading systems presuppose. China's National Emissions Trading Scheme, launched in its national phase in 2021 after years of regional pilot programs, represents the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions volume. Yet the political economy of this market differs in critical ways from European or North American analogues. In China, the entities regulated are predominantly state-owned enterprises with complex principal-agent relationships to central and provincial governments, creating conditions in which compliance incentives are mediated through bureaucratic hierarchies rather than purely through price signals. Understanding how the Chinese governance system — characterized by its vertical accountability structures, horizontal bureaucratic fragmentation across ministries, and significant variation in implementation capacity at subnational levels — shapes the actual functioning of ostensibly market-based climate instruments is therefore not merely an academic exercise. It speaks directly to whether China's headline climate commitments, including its pledge to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, can be understood as credible policy trajectories or aspirational statements requiring substantial institutional development to realize.
The governance dimensions of China's climate transition connect to broader debates in comparative political economy about the relationship between state capacity, industrial policy, and environmental regulation in late-developing economies. China's approach has been marked by what some scholars describe as an experimentalist or adaptive governance model, in which policy instruments are tested in subnational contexts, evaluated, and selectively scaled — a methodology that has been applied to renewable energy subsidies, electric vehicle industrial policy, and emissions trading design alike. This approach reflects both the pragmatic flexibility of Chinese central planning traditions and the genuine uncertainty that surrounds optimal policy design in a sector as technically complex and economically consequential as energy. At the same time, the political economy of climate governance in China cannot be disentangled from the interests of carbon-intensive industries, coal-dependent provincial economies, and the employment considerations that accompany any serious industrial transition. Provincial governments in regions whose fiscal revenues and employment bases are heavily tied to coal extraction and coal-fired power generation face structural incentives to moderate or delay implementation of climate policies that threaten these economic foundations, creating the familiar subnational compliance gaps that have characterized Chinese environmental governance across multiple policy domains. The interplay between central ambition and subnational resistance is not unique to China, but the scale at which it operates and the centrality of China's outcomes to global climate trajectories give it unusual analytical weight.
The market dimension of China's climate governance raises questions that connect to ongoing international debates about carbon pricing effectiveness, green finance architecture, and the role of private capital in enabling or accelerating decarbonization. China's carbon market, as well as its parallel development of green bond standards, environmental information disclosure requirements for listed companies, and taxonomies for sustainable finance, reflects an attempt to mobilize private capital at scale for climate-aligned investment. These efforts have attracted substantial attention from international development finance institutions, bilateral donors, and multilateral climate funds, who see in China's domestic green finance architecture both a potential model for other emerging economies and a significant counterpart for blended finance structures in third countries. Yet the credibility of China's green financial instruments has also been contested by researchers who note the breadth of activities included in Chinese green bond taxonomies relative to international standards, and the challenges of verifying environmental claims in a context where independent civil society monitoring capacity remains constrained by the political environment. This connects to a dimension of China's climate governance that receives comparatively less attention in market-focused analyses: the role, or more precisely the limited and carefully bounded role, of non-state actors including environmental NGOs, academic researchers, and community-based organizations in Chinese climate policy. In contrast to the institutional landscape in many OECD countries or in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America where civil society has played significant advocacy and monitoring functions in environmental governance, China's climate policy process remains substantially insulated from autonomous civil society participation, a feature with implications for policy accountability and adaptive learning that merit careful examination.
For development practitioners and researchers working on ODA programming, climate finance architecture, and South-South cooperation, the analytical questions raised by China's climate governance have direct operational relevance. China is an increasingly active provider of climate-related development finance through its own bilateral channels, including via the Belt and Road Initiative's green development frameworks and through contributions to multilateral climate funds. The governance model China applies domestically — characterized by state-led direction, strong industrial policy coordination, significant public investment in strategic sectors, and market mechanisms operating within administratively defined parameters — is also, implicitly or explicitly, the model that Chinese development finance tends to reinforce in partner countries. Whether this model produces durable, institutionally embedded climate outcomes or remains vulnerable to the same implementation gaps and political economy pressures that affect China's domestic performance is a question with substantial bearing on how development partners should evaluate, engage with, and seek to complement Chinese climate finance. Forward-looking research in this space would benefit from deeper empirical engagement with subnational implementation dynamics within China, comparative analysis of how China's climate governance model travels or transforms in the contexts of different partner country political economies, and serious attention to the governance of energy transition in carbon-intensive developing country contexts where the distributive conflicts are acute and institutional capacity is genuinely constrained. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's sustained analytical attention to China's political economy of climate governance contributes to exactly the kind of rigorous, empirically grounded regional scholarship that can inform more sophisticated and contextually sensitive international policy engagement.