Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-05
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China manages its climate transition sits at the intersection of some of the most consequential governance challenges of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest installer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate politics — a country whose domestic policy choices carry systemic implications far beyond its borders. Understanding the internal mechanics of how China translates climate commitments into governance architecture and market design is therefore not merely of academic interest; it is a prerequisite for any serious engagement with the global decarbonization project. The article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia addresses this complexity by examining the interplay between political transition, institutional governance, and market-based instruments in shaping China's climate policy trajectory. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of literature that resists both uncritical celebration of China's green ambitions and reductive dismissal of its environmental credentials.
China's climate policy landscape has undergone a profound transformation since the announcement of its dual carbon targets — peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020. These commitments, reaffirmed at successive international forums including COP26 and COP28, represented a significant elevation of climate action in China's national development discourse. Yet the translation of these headline commitments into functional governance mechanisms has been far from straightforward. The Chinese state's approach to climate governance reflects deep tensions within the party-state apparatus itself: between central planning imperatives and local implementation discretion, between the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and legacy energy ministries, and between the long-term structural adjustments required by decarbonization and the short-term growth and employment pressures that continue to define political performance metrics at the provincial level. An analysis grounded in the Journal of Contemporary Asia's tradition of rigorous political economy inquiry must therefore situate China's climate policy not merely as a technical regulatory challenge but as an expression of contested state capacity and bureaucratic negotiation.
The national emissions trading scheme, formally launched in February 2021 and covering the power sector before anticipated expansion into steel, cement, and aluminum, represents one of the most scrutinized market instruments in contemporary climate governance. Covering roughly 2,200 companies and approximately 40 percent of China's total CO2 emissions at its inception, the ETS was heralded as a landmark experiment in carbon pricing at scale. However, early assessments of its operational performance have been cautious. Carbon prices in China's national ETS have remained substantially lower than those observed in the European Union's Emissions Trading System, and the dominance of benchmarking approaches over absolute caps has limited the scheme's stringency. The allowance allocation methodology, which privileges intensity-based targets over economy-wide emissions ceilings, reflects a deliberate political compromise: it allows continued growth in output while imposing efficiency improvements, thereby reconciling the ETS with China's ongoing commitment to industrial expansion. This design choice reveals something important about how market mechanisms are embedded within, rather than substituted for, the dirigiste logic of Chinese developmental governance.
At the regional and global level, China's climate governance trajectory intersects with broader dynamics in Official Development Assistance and South-South cooperation that are directly relevant to the concerns of development scholars and practitioners. China's Belt and Road Initiative has increasingly incorporated a green dimension — the Green BRI framework launched in 2021, the shift away from overseas coal financing announced in the same year, and the proliferation of bilateral green energy partnerships — yet the implementation gap between policy articulation and project-level reality remains substantial. For recipient countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, the question of whether China's domestic climate transition will accelerate or retard the greening of its external financing is of immediate material consequence. The governance frameworks analyzed in articles such as the one under review thus have direct implications for ODA researchers concerned with the conditionality, developmental quality, and environmental footprint of Chinese development finance. China's internal debates about market design, regulatory capacity, and sectoral transition timelines are not insulated from their external developmental effects.
The policy implications of this body of research are substantial. For governments seeking to engage constructively with China on climate, understanding the internal governance architecture — the role of the National Development and Reform Commission, the evolving authority of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the influence of state-owned enterprises in shaping allowance allocation rules — is essential for calibrating expectations about the pace and depth of China's decarbonization. For researchers in political economy and development studies, the Chinese case offers a rich laboratory for examining how authoritarian developmental states navigate the structural tensions between accumulation and ecological sustainability. The article's focus on the governance and market dimensions of China's climate policy is particularly timely given the current moment of geopolitical fragmentation, in which multilateral climate cooperation is under pressure from trade disputes, technology decoupling, and competing regulatory standards. China's ETS, its green industrial policy, and its overseas energy investments are increasingly legible as instruments not only of domestic environmental management but of geoeconomic positioning.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by several intersecting forces that scholars and practitioners would do well to monitor closely. The political economy of China's coal-producing provinces — Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang — and the distributional consequences of accelerated transition for millions of fossil fuel workers will test the capacity and political will of the central government to manage what is, in effect, a profound social transformation alongside a technological one. The credibility of China's 2060 carbon neutrality target will depend not on announcements but on the progressive tightening of ETS caps, the speed of renewable energy integration into grid management, and the fiscal architecture supporting low-carbon investment in lagging regions. For the international development community, the evolution of China's climate governance offers both cautionary lessons about the limits of market mechanisms in the absence of robust regulatory institutions, and instructive examples of how state capacity can be mobilized at scale when political priority aligns with institutional design. The scholarly conversation advanced by the Journal of Contemporary Asia on these questions is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the most consequential environmental governance experiment of our era.