Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-02
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's emergence as both the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its most prolific installer of renewable energy capacity has positioned its domestic climate policy as a structuring force in global environmental governance. At a moment when the United States has oscillated between multilateral engagement and unilateralist retreat, and when European carbon border mechanisms are reshaping trade relationships, the question of how Beijing governs its own ecological transition carries consequences that extend far beyond Chinese borders. The work published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a propitious moment for this analysis, engaging seriously with the institutional architectures, political incentives, and market instruments through which China is attempting to reconcile its developmental imperatives with internationally acknowledged environmental commitments. Understanding these dynamics is not merely an academic exercise — it is a precondition for any realistic assessment of whether the Paris Agreement's temperature targets remain achievable.
The conceptual triad announced in the article's title — transition, governance, and market — captures something important about the layered complexity of Chinese climate politics. Transition here refers not simply to an energy transition, though that is part of it, but to the broader political-economic reorientation that decarbonization demands of a state whose legitimacy has been historically grounded in industrialization and rising living standards. This is not a technocratic problem of switching fuel sources; it is a profoundly political challenge of managing entrenched interests in coal, heavy industry, and state-owned enterprises while simultaneously projecting an image of environmental leadership on the world stage. The governance dimension of the article's framework addresses how China's fragmented bureaucratic landscape — with overlapping mandates across the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and provincial governments — shapes the implementation of climate targets. Top-down goal-setting in Beijing has repeatedly collided with local incentive structures that reward GDP growth over carbon constraint, and understanding this tension is essential to evaluating the credibility of China's nationally determined contributions under the UNFCCC. The market dimension, meanwhile, engages with China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in its current form in 2021 and now the world's largest carbon market by coverage, raising fundamental questions about whether market mechanisms can function effectively in a political economy characterized by significant state intervention and opaque price-setting.
Within the broader landscape of Asian political economy, China's climate governance challenge reflects a tension that is visible, in different registers, across the region. The developmental state model, which channeled state capacity toward rapid industrialization in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and later China itself, built institutional reflexes and political coalitions oriented toward production, export, and growth. Repurposing those same state capacities for ecological transition requires not merely new policies but a renegotiation of the social contracts and bureaucratic cultures that undergirded the developmental era. Countries like South Korea and Japan have navigated versions of this renegotiation with varying success, and their experiences provide comparative reference points against which China's trajectory can be assessed. At the same time, China's scale and its position as the central node of regional supply chains means that its decarbonization pathway will restructure industrial geography across Southeast and South Asia, affecting ODA flows, investment patterns, and the developmental options available to lower-income countries that have relied on Chinese financing for coal-fired power generation. The green conditionality now being discussed within Chinese policy circles, including debates about the Belt and Road Initiative's environmental standards, signals that China's domestic climate transition is inseparable from its international development finance posture.
The policy implications of serious scholarly engagement with China's climate governance are significant for both multilateral institutions and bilateral development partners. For organizations operating in the ODA space, the analytical distinction between China's formal climate commitments and the governance realities that shape implementation is indispensable. Aid agencies and development banks designing climate-aligned programming in regions where Chinese finance is dominant need to understand not only what Beijing's official targets are but how provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, and financial institutions actually respond to those targets. Scholarship that illuminates the gap between announced policy and implemented practice, or that maps the specific bureaucratic pathways through which carbon market revenues are allocated, provides the kind of granular institutional knowledge that informs effective program design. For researchers working on global environmental governance more broadly, the China case challenges prevailing assumptions about the relationship between market mechanisms and state authority, suggesting that carbon pricing can coexist with substantial state direction of investment without necessarily producing the efficiency outcomes that market-centric models predict.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by several forces that are difficult to model with precision but that practitioners and researchers should monitor carefully. The relationship between climate ambition and economic slowdown is particularly consequential: as China's growth rate moderates and domestic demand for energy-intensive goods contracts, the political economy of coal phase-down shifts, potentially opening space for faster decarbonization while simultaneously creating fiscal pressures that could constrain clean energy investment. The evolution of China's carbon market — particularly whether it will expand to cover sectors beyond power generation, and whether allowance prices will rise to levels that meaningfully alter investment decisions — will serve as a real-time indicator of whether market governance instruments are being permitted to function or are being subordinated to other political priorities. Finally, the interaction between China's climate governance and its geopolitical positioning, including its relationship with the Global South through multilateral climate finance negotiations, will determine whether China's domestic transition contributes to or complicates the emergence of a genuinely global low-carbon order. For researchers at institutions like IOCSS focused on civil society, development, and global political economy, these intersections represent a rich and urgent research agenda whose importance will only grow in the years ahead.