Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-20
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's emergence as both the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and one of its most ambitious climate pledgers has produced one of the most consequential governance puzzles of the contemporary era. As the global community struggles to operationalize the Paris Agreement amid renewed geopolitical fragmentation, the internal architecture of Chinese climate policymaking has taken on significance that extends well beyond its borders. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages precisely this terrain — examining how China's climate commitments are being translated into governance structures and market instruments, and what the dynamics of that translation reveal about the country's developmental trajectory and its positioning within the broader international political economy of decarbonization. The timing of this intervention is notable: with China's 2030 peaking targets and 2060 carbon neutrality goal now embedded in domestic planning frameworks, scholarly scrutiny of the implementation architecture has become urgently necessary.
The analytical framing around transition, governance, and market reflects a sophisticated understanding of the layered nature of China's policy environment. China's climate strategy cannot be reduced to a single bureaucratic mandate or a top-down regulatory edict. Rather, it is the product of competing institutional logics — the developmental imperatives of state-owned enterprises in carbon-intensive sectors, the innovation ambitions of subnational governments seeking green industrial leadership, the risk-management calculations of financial regulators confronting stranded-asset exposure, and the diplomatic signaling needs of a state whose international legitimacy is increasingly tied to its green credentials. Any serious account of Chinese climate governance must grapple with this layered complexity, and the focus on the governance-market interface suggests an effort to do precisely that. The question of how market mechanisms — carbon trading, green finance, regulatory incentives for renewable deployment — are embedded within, constrained by, or reshaping authoritarian governance structures is among the most generative in contemporary comparative political economy.
China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021 and covering the power sector before gradual expansion into other industries, represents one of the world's largest carbon markets by covered emissions. Yet its design and performance have consistently revealed the tensions inherent in deploying market instruments within a political system where price discovery is subordinated to stability concerns and where enforcement capacity varies dramatically across provincial jurisdictions. The governance literature on Chinese environmental policy has long documented the implementation gap between central mandates and local execution, a gap shaped by the career incentive structures of local officials, the fiscal dependencies of subnational governments on heavy industry, and the enforcement limitations of environmental regulators relative to economic development agencies. How these structural conditions shape the evolution of China's carbon market — its price levels, coverage breadth, compliance rates, and integration with international carbon frameworks — is not merely a technical question but a deeply political one. The article's engagement with the governance dimension thus opens space for connecting climate policy to the broader scholarship on Chinese state capacity, principal-agent dynamics within the party-state, and the contested politics of green industrial policy.
The market dimension carries additional significance when placed within the global context of green industrial competition. China's extraordinary scale-up of solar, wind, and battery manufacturing capacity over the past decade has reshaped global supply chains for clean energy technologies, generating both enthusiasm among climate advocates and anxiety among policymakers in the European Union, the United States, and across the Global South. The climate-trade nexus — captured in debates over carbon border adjustment mechanisms, the Inflation Reduction Act's domestic content requirements, and the adequacy of existing multilateral trade rules for a decarbonizing world economy — is now among the most contested arenas in international economic governance. China's domestic climate policy choices, particularly those that affect the cost structures and export competitiveness of its green technology sector, have direct implications for the affordability of energy transitions in lower-income countries, for the viability of ODA-funded climate projects, and for the coherence of multilateral climate finance architecture. A scholarly account of China's climate governance that connects domestic institutional dynamics to these international economic implications makes a genuine contribution to the field.
From a policy and research standpoint, the article's framing also invites reflection on the limits of technocratic approaches to climate governance. International climate finance discussions, including those within the OECD's Development Assistance Committee and the evolving architecture of the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance, have increasingly emphasized the importance of policy and institutional capacity in recipient countries. China's experience — with all its contradictions and implementation unevenness — offers a large-N laboratory for studying how governance systems adapt, or fail to adapt, to the demands of decarbonization at scale. For practitioners working in ODA contexts, understanding the political economy of China's green transition matters both because of China's growing role as a provider of development finance and green technology and because its governance models, including its state-led industrial policy approach to clean energy, are being studied and selectively adopted by governments across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this kind of work is substantial. As China moves toward the post-2030 phase of its climate commitments, the governance challenges will intensify rather than diminish: expanding the emissions trading scheme into hard-to-abate sectors, aligning financial system incentives with decarbonization goals, managing the social and regional dimensions of transition in coal-dependent communities, and navigating the tension between green industrial ambition and the sustainability of international trade relationships. The intersection of these domestic governance challenges with the international political economy of climate — including the role of multilateral institutions, development banks, and bilateral ODA frameworks in supporting or constraining national climate transitions — will require sustained scholarly attention. Articles that take the governance-market interface seriously, as this one appears to do, are essential contributions to an evolving literature that must remain attuned to both the systemic pressures driving decarbonization and the institutional realities that will determine whether and how those pressures translate into durable policy outcomes.