Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-21
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases navigates the simultaneous demands of continued economic development, political legitimacy, and international climate commitments has become one of the defining analytical puzzles of the contemporary era. China's climate policy sits at the intersection of domestic governance imperatives and the global architecture of environmental multilateralism, making it an indispensable subject for scholars of political economy, development studies, and international relations alike. As the international community accelerates efforts toward net-zero transitions, understanding how Beijing formulates, implements, and adjusts its climate agenda is not merely an academic exercise — it carries profound implications for the trajectory of global emissions, the viability of multilateral climate finance frameworks, and the broader contest over norms and institutions shaping twenty-first century development.
The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia engages with China's climate policy through three interlocking analytical lenses: transition, governance, and market. This tripartite framing is analytically productive precisely because it refuses the reductive narratives that dominate much Western commentary — neither the optimistic reading that positions China as a reluctant but ultimately cooperative green giant, nor the pessimistic framing that treats Chinese environmental commitments as purely strategic posturing. Instead, by holding transition, governance, and market in productive tension, the analysis illuminates the contradictions and path dependencies that shape what Chinese climate policy actually does, as opposed to what it declares. China's dual carbon targets — peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — represent the most ambitious climate pledges ever made by a developing economy in absolute terms, but translating these targets into institutional reality requires navigating a fragmented governance landscape, a state-market relationship unlike that found in either liberal democracies or classical developmental states, and a historical legacy of coal-dependent industrialization that continues to structure the political economy of energy in profound ways.
On the question of governance, the article's contribution reflects a growing recognition in the comparative politics literature that Chinese environmental policy cannot be adequately understood through the lens of either top-down command-and-control or straightforward market liberalism. The Chinese party-state has constructed an elaborate multi-level governance architecture for climate and energy, one in which national targets are disaggregated to provincial governments that face competing incentives to deliver economic growth and environmental compliance simultaneously. Local officials, whose career advancement has historically been tied to GDP performance, now operate within a system where environmental metrics carry increasing weight in cadre evaluation — but where the translation of central mandates into local action remains deeply uneven. This unevenness is not simply a story of bureaucratic dysfunction; it reflects the structural reality that provinces differ dramatically in their industrial composition, energy endowments, and fiscal capacity. Coal-rich interior provinces face transition challenges categorically different from those confronting the coastal manufacturing hubs that have benefited most from China's integration into global value chains. The governance dimension thus foregrounds the political economy of just transition as a domestic challenge, not merely an international one.
The market dimension of the analysis engages with one of the most consequential policy experiments in contemporary climate governance: China's national emissions trading system, launched as a nationwide mechanism in 2021 after years of regional pilots. The Chinese ETS now covers the largest share of national emissions of any carbon market in the world, yet its design features — including the use of carbon intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps, the initial restriction to the power sector, and the relatively modest carbon price levels observed in early trading periods — reflect deliberate choices about how to balance emissions control with the political protection of energy-intensive industries during transition. This market-based architecture connects to broader debates in development studies about the degree to which carbon pricing instruments developed in the context of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development economies can be transposed into very different political-economic contexts without fundamental redesign. China's experience suggests that the answer is nuanced: market mechanisms are being adopted, but they are being embedded within a state-coordinated framework that uses administrative direction alongside price signals in ways that complicate conventional assumptions about how carbon markets function.
The broader significance of this analysis extends well beyond China's borders, with direct implications for official development assistance architectures, South-South cooperation frameworks, and the global politics of climate finance. China is simultaneously a major recipient of multilateral climate finance through mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund, a significant bilateral provider of infrastructure and energy finance to developing countries through the Belt and Road Initiative, and an increasingly assertive voice in international negotiations over the governance of climate-related financial flows. How Beijing's domestic climate governance evolves will shape the terms on which Chinese development finance is offered to partner countries, the conditions attached to energy sector investments across Asia and Africa, and the credibility of China's claims to leadership within the Global South on climate justice issues. Development practitioners and ODA scholars must therefore treat China's domestic policy trajectory not as a separate analytical domain but as constitutively connected to the international political economy of climate governance.
Looking forward, the analytical framework offered in this article points toward several research and policy frontiers that merit sustained attention. The interaction between China's expanding green industrial policy — including its extraordinary dominance of global solar panel and electric vehicle manufacturing — and its climate governance architecture raises important questions about how industrial strategy and emissions regulation co-evolve within a state capitalist framework. As Chinese-manufactured clean energy technologies become central to the decarbonization strategies of countries across the Global South, the governance models and market assumptions embedded in those supply chains will travel with the hardware, creating new forms of technological and regulatory interdependence. For researchers at the intersection of development studies and environmental politics, this moment calls for analytical frameworks capable of holding together the material dimensions of energy transition, the institutional logics of authoritarian environmentalism, and the normative contests over who bears responsibility for global decarbonization costs. China's climate policy, in this reading, is not only a subject of empirical inquiry — it is a lens through which some of the most fundamental tensions in contemporary global political economy are being worked out in real time.