Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-18
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's emergence as both the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy capacity has placed its climate policy at the center of global debates about the future of sustainable development. As multilateral climate frameworks struggle to maintain political momentum in an era of renewed great power competition and donor fragmentation in official development assistance, the governance architecture that China constructs to manage its own energy transition carries consequences far beyond its borders. Published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" addresses a subject of urgent scholarly and policy relevance: how a developmental state with a historically carbon-intensive growth model is attempting to restructure its energy economy through a combination of administrative command, market-based incentives, and evolving multi-level governance arrangements. The article arrives at a moment when the credibility of China's dual carbon targets — carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — is being actively tested by structural economic pressures, subnational political resistance, and the competing imperatives of energy security and industrial competitiveness.
The analytical core of the article engages with a long-standing debate in comparative political economy: whether market mechanisms can be effectively embedded within an authoritarian developmental state, and under what conditions they produce meaningful outcomes rather than symbolic compliance. China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021 and covering the power sector before phased expansion into other industries, represents the world's largest carbon market by volume. Yet the article's likely contribution is to demonstrate that the formal existence of such a market tells only a partial story. The governance of carbon pricing in China is inseparable from the administrative logic of the party-state, in which local governments retain powerful incentives to protect employment and industrial output, and in which the allocation of emissions permits has historically been structured in ways that limit the price discovery function that gives carbon markets their theoretical efficiency. Understanding China's climate governance therefore requires moving beyond the market-state binary and examining how regulatory authority, fiscal incentives, and information systems are distributed across a layered hierarchy of central ministries, provincial governments, and municipal implementing agencies. The transition underway is not merely technological but deeply institutional.
The article's significance for scholars of Asian political economy lies in its contribution to a growing literature on the "green developmental state," a concept that challenges earlier assumptions about the incompatibility of rapid industrialization and environmental ambition. China's experience complicates the linear narratives of environmental Kuznets curves and suggests that state capacity, rather than income level alone, shapes the trajectory of environmental governance. The comparison with other large emerging economies — India's solar expansion, Vietnam's renewable energy surge, Indonesia's coal dependency — reveals that the institutional configuration of the state matters enormously in determining whether national climate commitments translate into implemented policy. Within the East and Southeast Asian context, China's regulatory experiments in carbon markets, green bond standards, and climate-related financial disclosure requirements are increasingly setting reference points for neighboring jurisdictions, even in cases where those jurisdictions maintain political distance from Beijing. The normative influence of Chinese climate governance, operating through multilateral forums, bilateral investment frameworks, and shared financing standards along the Belt and Road corridor, constitutes a form of soft regulatory power that the article implicitly engages.
From a policy standpoint, the article's analysis of the tension between transition and governance carries direct implications for international climate finance and ODA architecture. Development assistance actors — whether bilateral donors, multilateral development banks, or the expanding network of climate funds — must contend with a China that is simultaneously a recipient of technical knowledge exchange on governance reform, a competitor in the global green technology supply chain, and a provider of development finance to dozens of economies in the Global South whose energy choices will determine whether global temperature pathways remain viable. The design of just transition frameworks, which have gained increasing prominence in post-2020 climate diplomacy, is complicated by the Chinese model, which emphasizes state-directed industrial policy and is skeptical of the social conditionality embedded in many Western ODA approaches. For civil society actors seeking entry points into China's climate policymaking, the governance landscape remains highly constrained, with environmental non-governmental organizations operating in a contracted space since the regulatory tightening of 2017. The article's treatment of this dynamic is significant for researchers working on the intersection of climate governance and civil society participation.
Looking forward, the questions raised by this article will only intensify as the 2030 carbon peaking deadline approaches and as the international community seeks to assess China's compliance trajectory. The structural economic slowdown that has followed the post-pandemic period has already created renewed pressure on carbon-intensive sectors, as local governments prioritize output and employment over environmental targets. The geopolitical dimension of climate policy — including the implications of Western industrial policies that treat Chinese clean energy products as strategic threats rather than climate solutions — adds a further layer of complexity that domestic governance analyses alone cannot fully capture. For practitioners in development finance and ODA, the Chinese case offers a counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on private sector mobilization and regulatory convergence, suggesting that the state remains the indispensable actor in managing large-scale energy transitions, whatever the theoretical elegance of market-based instruments. For researchers in comparative political economy and Asian studies, "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" provides an important contribution to a literature that must grapple with the reality that the most consequential climate governance experiment of the twenty-first century is unfolding within a political system that confounds the assumptions of both liberal institutionalism and classical developmental state theory. The intellectual challenge — and the policy stakes — could scarcely be higher.