Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-03
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The accelerating pace of global climate change has placed the question of major emitter governance at the center of international political economy scholarship. No single actor weighs more heavily in this conversation than China, which accounts for roughly a quarter to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously represents the world's largest deployer of renewable energy capacity. Against a backdrop of fractured multilateralism — the contested legacy of the Paris Agreement, the partial withdrawal of the United States from climate commitments, and the growing assertiveness of the Global South in demanding differentiated responsibilities — China's domestic climate governance has become a pivot point for understanding whether the international community can achieve anything close to its decarbonization targets. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages precisely this terrain, examining how China navigates the overlapping pressures of economic transition, multilevel governance complexity, and the gradual expansion of market-based instruments. Its contribution lies not merely in descriptive mapping but in interrogating the internal tensions that shape Chinese climate policymaking, tensions whose resolution or persistence will carry profound consequences far beyond the country's borders.
The conceptual core of the article's argument appears to rest on the triadic relationship captured in its title: transition, governance, and market. These are not simply three parallel descriptors but constitute an interlocking problematic. China's climate policy is best understood as a managed transition — one in which the state retains strong directional authority while selectively deploying market mechanisms to achieve efficiency and scalability that direct command-and-control approaches cannot easily deliver. This reflects a broader pattern visible in Chinese political economy: the instrumentalization of markets within a framework of party-state strategic direction, rather than the substitution of market logic for state authority. The governance dimension is equally central. China's decentralized administrative structure, in which provincial and local governments bear enormous implementation responsibilities but also harbor powerful industrial constituencies resistant to rapid decarbonization, creates endemic gaps between centrally mandated targets and subnational delivery. The article's analytical contribution is likely to show how these governance gaps are not incidental implementation failures but are structurally embedded in the incentive architectures that define center-local relations in the People's Republic.
Connecting this analysis to broader regional and global trends illuminates several important dynamics. China's rollout of its national emissions trading scheme (ETS), the largest carbon market by covered emissions in the world, represents a significant experiment in whether market-based carbon pricing can be operationalized in a non-liberal-democratic developmental state context. The lessons, positive and negative, carry direct relevance for other large emerging economies — India, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam — that are contemplating similar instruments. In the context of official development assistance and South-South cooperation, China's own climate governance experience informs the models and standards it exports through the Belt and Road Initiative and its growing climate finance architecture. Where China invests in renewable energy infrastructure across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, it carries with it institutional templates, technical standards, and governance assumptions that shape recipient countries' own climate trajectories. Understanding the internal logic and contradictions of Chinese climate governance is therefore inseparable from understanding the political economy of green development in the Global South more broadly.
The policy implications extend in multiple directions. For Chinese policymakers, the article likely reinforces the urgency of strengthening vertical accountability mechanisms to reduce the center-local implementation gap, while also signaling the risks of over-relying on market instruments whose price discovery functions remain constrained by political sensitivities around industrial competitiveness and employment. For international partners and multilateral institutions, the analysis suggests a need to engage China not as a monolithic state actor but as a site of contested policy processes, where scientific agencies, industrial ministries, local governments, and market regulators often pursue partially divergent agendas. Development finance institutions and bilateral donors designing climate-related conditionalities or partnership frameworks need to appreciate that Chinese counterparts are themselves navigating complex internal constraints, not simply executing a unified national strategy. This more granular understanding is essential for effective climate diplomacy. The research also reinforces the scholarly significance of moving beyond binary framings — China as either climate leader or climate villain — toward differentiated institutional analysis that can illuminate the specific leverage points where policy improvement is feasible.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by at least three converging pressures that researchers and practitioners should track closely. First, the interaction between carbon border adjustment mechanisms introduced by the European Union and potentially other major economies and China's own carbon pricing architecture will create new incentives — and new political contests — around the integrity and ambition of Chinese emissions governance. Second, the domestic political economy of coal remains a powerful drag on transition, particularly in rust-belt provinces where energy security narratives and employment concerns continue to mobilize bureaucratic resistance; how Xi Jinping's administration manages this coalition over the next decade will be diagnostic of China's capacity to achieve its announced carbon neutrality commitments by 2060. Third, the competitive dynamics of the global clean technology industry — in which China has established commanding positions in solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles — introduce a commercial interest in green transition that may prove more durable than normative climate commitments alone. For researchers affiliated with institutes focused on civil society, development, and global political economy, the article offers a reminder that climate governance cannot be disaggregated from the deeper structures of state-market relations, center-periphery tensions, and geopolitical positioning that define the contemporary international order. The analytical frameworks it deploys deserve wider application across the comparative political economy of climate governance in Asia and beyond.