Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-06
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China occupies a singular position in contemporary climate governance: it is simultaneously the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the leading installer of renewable energy capacity, and a pivotal actor in shaping the institutional frameworks through which global climate commitments are translated into national action. This dual identity — polluter and pioneer — renders the politics of China's climate transition among the most consequential policy processes of the twenty-first century. As the international community grapples with the widening gap between nationally determined contributions and the Paris Agreement's temperature targets, understanding how China governs its own decarbonization pathway, and the contradictions embedded within that process, is not merely an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for any serious engagement with the structural realities of global climate politics. The Journal of Contemporary Asia has long served as a venue for rigorous political economy analysis of the region's transformations, and scholarship on China's climate policy situated within this tradition invites scholars and practitioners alike to move beyond technocratic framings and interrogate the political, institutional, and market dynamics that actually determine outcomes.
At the core of China's climate transition lies a set of ambitious but structurally complex commitments: to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. These "dual carbon" goals, announced by President Xi Jinping at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, represent a significant recalibration of the relationship between economic development imperatives and environmental governance in China's political economy. Yet the governance architecture through which these goals must be realized is marked by persistent tensions between central mandates and local implementation. Provincial governments, which retain substantial discretion over energy mix decisions and industrial policy, have historically prioritized growth metrics that conflict with emissions reduction targets. The central state's response — including performance evaluations tied to environmental indicators, energy intensity caps, and the gradual expansion of carbon trading — reflects an attempt to realign incentives across a multilevel governance system that was designed for a different political economy context. Analyzing this governance architecture reveals not a unitary state pursuing coherent green objectives, but a contested institutional landscape in which the politics of transition play out between bureaucratic actors with divergent interests and constituencies.
The development of China's national emissions trading system (ETS), launched in its full iteration in 2021, represents perhaps the most significant market-based instrument in global climate governance by sheer scale of coverage. Beginning with the power sector and covering roughly 2,200 enterprises responsible for approximately 4.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, the Chinese ETS constitutes the world's largest carbon market. However, the market's functioning has been characterized by a number of structural limitations that reflect the broader governance challenges of China's climate transition. Allowance allocation has remained predominantly free, price signals have been weak relative to those observed in more mature systems such as the European Union Emissions Trading System, and compliance obligations have been set at levels that minimize disruption to existing industrial actors. These design choices are not accidental; they reflect deliberate political calculations about the pace of transition that incumbent industries and regional governments can absorb. Understanding the Chinese ETS therefore requires situating it not within an idealized market-efficiency framework, but within the political economy of a developmental state navigating the contradictions between industrial policy, energy security, and decarbonization commitments simultaneously.
The implications of China's climate governance trajectory extend well beyond its borders, intersecting directly with development finance, South-South cooperation, and the politics of the global energy transition. China's overseas investment footprint — channeled through policy banks, state-owned enterprises, and Belt and Road Initiative frameworks — has historically included a significant proportion of fossil fuel infrastructure, a fact that drew considerable criticism from climate advocates through the 2010s. The announced commitment in 2021 to cease financing overseas coal power plants marked a notable shift, one that reflected both genuine normative evolution and strategic repositioning in a global context where the reputational and financial risks of stranded fossil assets are increasingly legible to Chinese financial institutions. For ODA researchers and development practitioners, this shift raises important questions about the conditionalities, standards, and transparency mechanisms that govern Chinese development finance's engagement with host-country energy transitions, and whether the emerging frameworks of green finance alignment are substantive or primarily rhetorical. The interaction between China's domestic transition governance and its external development finance posture represents an underexplored but consequential dimension of global climate political economy.
Looking forward, the scholarly and policy significance of rigorous analysis of China's climate governance cannot be overstated. As the global community enters what many analysts describe as a critical decade for climate action, the credibility and implementation depth of China's transition commitments will shape not only atmospheric outcomes but also the political dynamics of multilateral climate negotiations, the competitiveness trajectories of green industrial sectors, and the terms on which developing countries can access clean energy finance and technology. For researchers working at the intersection of political economy, development studies, and climate governance, China presents both a methodological challenge and a theoretical opportunity: a case that resists easy categorization within existing frameworks of either liberal market transition or authoritarian state capacity, and that demands new analytical tools adequate to the complexity of a socialist market economy undergoing a state-directed ecological transition. The work of situating China's climate policy within comparative and historical frameworks — tracing the continuities with developmental state theory, the discontinuities with earlier environmental governance failures, and the emergent tensions between carbon market mechanisms and industrial policy imperatives — remains an open and urgent agenda for the field.