Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-19
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China governs its climate transition has become one of the most consequential analytical problems in contemporary global political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest deployer of renewable energy capacity, China occupies a structurally paradoxical position in international climate politics — at once the primary driver of the problem and an increasingly indispensable architect of any credible solution. The urgency of this analytical puzzle has only deepened in the years following the Paris Agreement, as the global community confronts the widening gap between pledged commitments and observed trajectories of decarbonization. Understanding the internal mechanics of China's climate governance — how state authority is constituted, how market signals are interpreted and mediated, and how policy instruments are calibrated across competing institutional interests — is therefore not merely an academic exercise. It is a practical imperative for researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners seeking to engage China constructively within multilateral climate frameworks.
The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia engages precisely this analytical terrain, examining China's climate policy through the intersecting lenses of energy transition, state governance, and market construction. At the core of the analysis lies a recognition that China's climate response cannot be adequately understood through either a purely technocratic or a purely geopolitical lens. The Chinese state's approach to decarbonization is neither a simple top-down command economy imposing fixed emissions targets, nor is it a market-liberal experiment in price signaling and private sector leadership. Rather, it represents a distinctive hybrid formation — what scholars of Chinese political economy have increasingly described as a developmental state orientation toward green industrial transformation. The central policy apparatus combines administrative instruments such as intensity-based emissions caps, regulatory mandates for renewable energy procurement, and central planning targets for sectoral transition, with emergent market mechanisms including the national emissions trading scheme launched in 2021 and provincial-level carbon pilots that preceded it. This layering of governance modalities reflects the broader logic of Chinese state capitalism: maintaining authoritative control over strategic directions while selectively deploying market incentives to accelerate preferred outcomes and allocate costs.
The governance dimension of China's climate transition raises important questions about institutional capacity and policy coherence. One of the enduring challenges documented in the literature on Chinese environmental governance is the structural tension between central mandates and local implementation. Provincial and municipal governments, whose fiscal incentives and political promotion criteria have historically been tied to GDP growth and industrial output, have frequently demonstrated reluctance to implement environmental regulations at the pace and stringency demanded by central authorities. The article situates this tension within the current moment of transition, where the central leadership under Xi Jinping has moved decisively to strengthen the role of the National Development and Reform Commission and, subsequently, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in asserting climate governance authority. The dual carbon goals — peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — announced in 2020 represent a qualitative escalation in the ambition of central climate commitments, but their translation into binding subnational compliance remains an ongoing and contested process. This gap between declarative ambition and operational implementation is not incidental; it reflects deep structural features of China's multilevel governance architecture that cannot be resolved through policy design alone.
The market dimensions of the analysis connect to broader global debates about the political economy of green transition. China's national emissions trading scheme, now covering the power sector and representing the world's largest carbon market by volume, embeds the logic of carbon pricing within a system still heavily mediated by state planning. Carbon prices in the Chinese market have remained relatively low by international comparison, reflecting deliberate choices by regulators to avoid disruption to energy-intensive industries during a phase of structural adjustment. This design choice illuminates a recurring tension in climate governance globally: between the economic efficiency logic of carbon pricing, which favors high and rising prices, and the political economy of transition management, which favors gradualism and sectoral accommodation. China's approach offers an instructive comparative case for development finance institutions, bilateral donors, and multilateral agencies engaged in supporting green transition in middle-income and developing countries, where similar pressures between transformation and stability routinely shape the pace and form of policy change. The ODA community has increasingly recognized that effective climate finance must engage with these governance realities rather than imposing externally designed market architectures that lack the institutional foundations for sustainable operation.
Looking forward, the analytical stakes of understanding China's climate governance trajectory are unlikely to diminish. The coming decade will determine whether China's dual carbon commitments translate into a credible national trajectory consistent with a below-2-degrees global pathway, or whether the structural weight of coal dependency, industrial political economy, and local fiscal pressures continue to slow implementation below the required pace. For international researchers and practitioners, the lesson is that engagement with China's climate governance must be simultaneously attentive to the formal architecture of policy instruments, the political economy of institutional incentives, and the market realities that condition how those instruments operate in practice. Civil society researchers and development scholars in particular have a distinctive role to play in generating comparative analysis that holds this complexity in view, neither overstating China's green achievements nor dismissing the genuine and historically unprecedented scale of its renewable energy transition. The scholarly agenda opened by this article — connecting transition politics, governance capacity, and market construction in a single analytical frame — offers a productive model for the kind of rigorous, empirically grounded work that the field urgently requires.