Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-27
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases governs its energy transition is not merely an environmental concern — it is one of the defining political economy questions of the early twenty-first century. China's climate commitments, formalized through its Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement and its domestic pledges to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, represent a policy project of extraordinary ambition and complexity. Yet ambition and outcomes are not synonymous, particularly in a system where the relationship between central mandates and local implementation is historically fraught, where market mechanisms are embedded within a deeply statist political economy, and where the governance architecture for climate policy remains a site of ongoing institutional contestation. A recent article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia addresses precisely these tensions, examining China's climate policy through the intersecting lenses of energy transition, governance structure, and the construction of carbon markets — offering a timely and analytically rigorous intervention into a literature that has sometimes struggled to move beyond headline figures.
The core analytical contribution of this work lies in its refusal to treat China's climate governance as a unified, top-down project that moves coherently from Beijing's ambitions to ground-level reality. Instead, the article situates China's transition within the layered and often contradictory institutional landscape that characterizes Chinese governance more broadly. The central government has articulated increasingly bold climate targets, and the creation of the national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), launched in 2021, represents a significant institutional development — the largest carbon market in the world by covered emissions. Yet the article probes beneath the headline achievement to examine how the market is actually functioning: whether price signals are robust enough to drive genuine decarbonization, whether the allocation mechanisms embedded in the ETS reflect real scarcity and cost, and whether local governments and state-owned enterprises — historically the dominant actors in China's political economy — are genuinely internalizing carbon constraints into their investment and operational decisions. These are questions that aggregate data and official narratives tend to obscure, and the analytical value of the work lies in surfacing them.
The governance tensions identified in the article resonate with a well-established body of scholarship on Chinese central-local relations, but they take on distinctive characteristics in the climate domain. Unlike some regulatory areas where local governments have incentives to comply with or even exceed central mandates, carbon regulation intersects with local fiscal interests, employment dependencies on heavy industry, and the political careers of officials whose performance is still substantially evaluated on economic growth metrics. The article's analysis suggests that even as the formal architecture of climate governance — including the ETS, sectoral targets, and institutional oversight arrangements — becomes more sophisticated, the underlying political economy of local implementation remains a persistent source of policy slippage. This is not a finding unique to China; implementation gaps are endemic to multi-level environmental governance systems globally. What distinguishes the Chinese case is the scale of the challenge and the speed at which the country is being asked to restructure an industrial base that has, over four decades, become the workshop of the world.
The implications extend well beyond China's borders. China's climate trajectory is consequential for global mitigation outcomes in direct terms — the carbon arithmetic of holding warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius simply does not work without rapid and deep decarbonization in China. But the article's focus on governance and market design also speaks to a broader debate in development and political economy scholarship about whether market mechanisms can be effectively constructed within statist political economies, and what the preconditions for such construction are. China's ETS has drawn considerable international attention as a potential model — or cautionary tale — for other large developing economies seeking to use carbon pricing as a transition instrument. The article's analysis suggests that the effectiveness of market mechanisms is inseparable from the governance context in which they are embedded, a point with direct relevance for development practitioners and multilateral institutions working on climate finance and policy transfer.
For ODA and development finance institutions, China's experience with climate governance raises important questions about the appropriate framing of international climate support. The multilateral development bank community has significantly shifted its portfolios toward climate-related lending in recent years, and the quality of governance frameworks in recipient countries is increasingly central to the design and conditionality of such instruments. China occupies an unusual position in this landscape — simultaneously a major bilateral donor through its Belt and Road Initiative and a country that continues, by some classification systems, to qualify for concessional finance. How China's own governance challenges in the climate domain are understood — and whether the lessons of its ETS experiment are drawn upon by practitioners working in comparable political economy contexts across Asia and beyond — will shape the intellectual and practical agenda of development finance for years to come.
Looking forward, the research agenda implied by this article is rich and consequential. The national ETS is still a relatively young institution, and its evolution over the coming decade will be a critical test of whether market mechanisms can be made to function in a system where the state retains commanding influence over the major covered entities. The extension of the ETS to additional sectors beyond power generation, the tightening of allocation benchmarks, and the development of secondary market infrastructure will all be important markers of policy seriousness. Equally important will be the question of how China's climate governance institutions interact with its broader economic restructuring — including the ongoing effort to shift away from real estate and heavy industry as engines of growth — and whether the political economy conditions for genuine decarbonization are being created or merely simulated. Scholars and practitioners who engage with this article will find in it a model for the kind of institutionally grounded, politically attentive analysis that the climate governance field urgently needs, and a reminder that the distance between policy design and policy outcome is never closed by ambition alone.