Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-17
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The acceleration of climate change has transformed it from an environmental concern into one of the defining axes of global political economy. For no country is this transformation more consequential — or more fraught with internal tension — than China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position at the center of the global energy transition. How Beijing navigates the intersection of climate ambition, governance capacity, and market design will shape not only its own developmental trajectory but the plausibility of multilateral climate goals for decades to come. The article under examination in the Journal of Contemporary Asia enters this debate with analytical precision, situating China's evolving climate policy framework within the structural dynamics of its governance system and the emergent architecture of its carbon and energy markets.
The article's central contribution lies in its treatment of China's climate governance not as a monolithic state directive handed down from central authorities, but as a layered and often contradictory process shaped by competing institutional interests, subnational actors, and market signals that are themselves artifacts of policy design. China's dual carbon goals — peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — have become the organizing framework for an extraordinary range of policy instruments, from the national emissions trading scheme launched in 2021 to provincial energy consumption controls and industrial restructuring mandates. Yet the article reveals that the relationship between these ambitions and their implementation is mediated by governance structures that were not designed with climate transition in mind. The vertical fragmentation between central ministries and local governments creates what scholars of Chinese politics have long identified as an implementation gap, but the climate context gives this gap particular urgency: the costs of delayed decarbonization are not merely administrative but cumulative and irreversible.
A significant dimension of the article's analysis concerns the role of market mechanisms in China's climate governance architecture. The national emissions trading scheme represents Beijing's most visible attempt to use price signals to drive decarbonization across the power sector, and its expansion to cover additional industries carries enormous implications for how carbon pricing interacts with state-owned enterprise behavior, local industrial policy, and the incentives facing private capital. The article engages seriously with the limitations of treating carbon markets as neutral technical instruments: in the Chinese context, where state ownership pervades the covered sectors and where local governments retain significant influence over enterprise operations, the market does not function in the neoclassical sense. Instead, carbon pricing becomes a governance instrument itself, one whose effectiveness depends on the credibility of enforcement, the tightness of caps, and the political willingness to allow economic pain when carbon costs bite. The article's examination of how these tensions play out in practice adds important nuance to optimistic assessments of China's ETS as a straightforward analogue to European carbon market experience.
Situated within the broader landscape of Asian political economy, the article's findings speak to a wider regional pattern in which developmental states are attempting to retrofit climate governance onto institutional structures built for rapid industrialization. The challenge facing China mirrors in many respects the dilemmas confronting South Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia, where ambitious net-zero pledges coexist with coal dependency, entrenched fossil fuel interests, and governance systems that prioritize growth stability over regulatory disruption. What distinguishes China's case is scale: the policy choices made in Beijing reverberate through global supply chains for solar panels, electric vehicles, and battery storage, making China's domestic governance challenges simultaneously a matter of international political economy. The article's attention to how central-local dynamics shape implementation thus carries implications beyond the China case, illuminating the general conditions under which developmental state institutions can and cannot be repurposed for ecological transition.
From a policy and research perspective, the article raises important questions about the conditions under which climate governance can be effective in high-growth, state-led economies. The conventional prescription of carbon pricing, regulatory stringency, and green finance needs to be interpreted through an institutional lens that accounts for the specific incentive structures facing state actors in these contexts. For development practitioners and ODA architects, this has practical implications: international climate finance and capacity-building efforts directed toward countries like China's neighbors in Southeast Asia must grapple with the same governance dynamics that the article identifies in the Chinese case. The assumption that well-designed market mechanisms will automatically produce the intended behavioral change underestimates the degree to which implementation fidelity depends on political commitment at multiple levels of government.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by at least three intersecting forces that the article implicitly identifies. First, the pace of technological change in renewables and storage is outrunning the assumptions embedded in existing policy frameworks, creating both opportunities and disruptive pressures for incumbent industries and their political patrons. Second, the interaction between China's domestic climate agenda and its international economic relationships — particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative and its green financing evolution — will increasingly make the domestic-international distinction analytically untenable. Third, the credibility of China's carbon neutrality commitment will be tested not in 2060 but in the near-term decisions around coal phase-down, which remain politically sensitive in ways that the article's governance analysis helps explain. For researchers, this suggests that the most productive analytical terrain lies at the intersection of political economy, institutional analysis, and climate science — exactly the space that work of this kind occupies and that deserves sustained scholarly attention as the energy transition moves from aspiration to contested reality.