Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-04
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China manages its transition to a lower-carbon economy has become one of the defining governance challenges of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest installer of renewable energy capacity, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate politics: it is both the central problem and an indispensable part of any credible solution. The stakes extend well beyond China's borders. International climate finance flows, the credibility of multilateral agreements such as the Paris Accord, and the pace of green technology diffusion across the Global South are all substantially conditioned by the choices Beijing makes about the speed, sequencing, and institutional design of its domestic energy transition. For scholars working at the intersection of Asian political economy and development studies, China's evolving climate governance architecture therefore represents not merely a national policy story but a structural variable shaping the broader trajectory of global environmental politics.
The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" engages with a nexus of questions that have preoccupied researchers for the better part of a decade, yet which have gained renewed urgency since China's 2020 pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 and peak emissions before 2030. At its core, the analytical challenge is to explain how a Leninist party-state with deep institutional commitments to heavy industrial growth and energy security has begun to reconfigure its regulatory architecture around climate objectives. The "transition" framing in the title is analytically significant: it signals that the authors are not simply documenting policy outputs but interrogating the political-economic dynamics through which established energy systems, vested industrial interests, and bureaucratic jurisdictions are being renegotiated. This is a far more demanding analytical task than cataloguing carbon targets, because it requires attention to the distributional consequences of decarbonization, the conflicts between central mandates and local implementation incentives, and the ways in which market instruments interact with — or are subordinated to — state planning priorities.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy is particularly revealing of broader tensions within the Chinese political system. China's climate bureaucracy has historically been fragmented across multiple ministries, with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and various state-owned enterprise conglomerates each exercising partial jurisdiction over energy and emissions decisions. The institutional reorganization that accompanied the launch of the National Carbon Market in 2021 represented an attempt to consolidate regulatory authority and introduce price signals into what had been an administratively managed system of emissions quotas. Yet as scholarship on Chinese environmental governance consistently demonstrates, the gap between central policy design and subnational implementation remains substantial. Local governments facing fiscal pressures and employment obligations have powerful incentives to shield energy-intensive industries from abrupt regulatory change, and the enforcement capacity of environmental regulators relative to economic planning agencies remains asymmetric. The article engages with precisely these tensions, situating China's carbon market not as a straightforward adoption of neoliberal environmental economics but as a hybrid instrument embedded in — and constrained by — the state's broader developmental priorities.
The market dimension of the analysis connects to a wider debate in comparative political economy about the relationship between state capitalism and climate governance. The received wisdom in environmental economics holds that carbon pricing, whether through cap-and-trade systems or carbon taxes, provides the most cost-effective pathway to emissions reduction by allowing abatement to occur where it is cheapest. China's National Emissions Trading Scheme, however, was designed with an allocation methodology based on output intensity rather than absolute caps, which has led critics to question whether it generates sufficient financial pressure to drive genuine structural change in the power sector. The political logic of this design choice is not difficult to discern: an intensity-based system allows the government to expand overall electricity generation — and thus support economic growth — while still claiming incremental emissions efficiency improvements. This reflects a broader pattern in Chinese climate governance where market instruments are deployed selectively, in ways that are compatible with, rather than disciplinary of, the state's investment-led growth model. Scholarly analysis of China's carbon market therefore cannot be disentangled from analysis of the party-state's fundamental commitments regarding economic structure and distributional politics.
From the perspective of international development and Official Development Assistance research, China's domestic climate governance has significant spillover implications. The Belt and Road Initiative remains a major conduit through which Chinese capital and technology flow to developing countries, and the composition of that investment portfolio — particularly the share of coal-fired power plants versus renewable energy projects — is directly influenced by regulatory and financial incentives operating within China's domestic political economy. As Chinese policy banks and state-owned enterprises face growing pressure from both domestic regulators and international reputational concerns to reduce overseas coal financing, the terms on which Chinese climate technology is transferred to partner countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia are being renegotiated. This creates important questions for ODA research about the conditionalities, technology transfer terms, and local capacity-building implications of Chinese green finance, and whether it represents a genuinely alternative development finance model or a repackaging of mercantilist industrial strategy under a climate rubric.
The policy implications of scholarly work in this vein extend to several audiences simultaneously. For policymakers in OECD countries and multilateral institutions seeking to engage China on climate finance and technology cooperation, the analytical lesson is that China's climate governance is not primarily responsive to external pressure but is driven by domestic political-economic bargaining among state agencies, industrial constituencies, and regional governments. Effective international engagement therefore requires understanding the internal distributional dynamics of China's transition rather than simply benchmarking Chinese commitments against Western normative frameworks. For developing country governments negotiating with China over energy infrastructure finance, the implication is more concrete: the terms of Chinese green energy investment are evolving rapidly, and governments that build technical capacity to evaluate technology specifications, financing terms, and ownership structures will be better positioned to capture development benefits while managing environmental and debt sustainability risks. For researchers in the field of Asian political economy, the China climate governance case offers a rich site for theoretical development around the relationship between authoritarian state capacity and market-based environmental regulation — a relationship that does not map neatly onto either statist or liberal analytical frameworks.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by several interacting variables that merit sustained scholarly attention. The pace of domestic energy transition will be influenced by the degree to which the costs of renewable energy continue to fall relative to coal, by the resolution of grid integration challenges associated with variable renewables, and by the willingness of provincial governments to accept the fiscal and employment consequences of coal sector contraction. The design and stringency of the National Carbon Market will evolve through a political process in which the Ministry of Ecology and Environment negotiates with industrial lobbies and regional power brokers, and the direction of that evolution will signal much about the relative weight of environmental and developmental priorities within the party-state's governing coalition. Internationally, China's engagement with the Loss and Damage Fund established at COP27, its positioning within BRICS climate discussions, and the green content of Belt and Road investments will all serve as indicators of whether Beijing's climate commitments are becoming institutionally embedded or remain primarily symbolic. Scholars and practitioners at the intersection of development studies, political economy, and environmental governance would do well to track these developments closely, for the outcomes will substantially determine whether the global climate transition proceeds with or without one of its most consequential participants.