Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-07
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China manages its climate transition has become one of the defining governance challenges of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of the largest investors in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a structurally contradictory position in global climate politics. This contradiction is not merely technical — it is deeply political, embedded in competing imperatives of economic growth, energy security, state authority, and international legitimacy. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a moment when scholars and practitioners alike are grappling with whether China's climate commitments represent genuine systemic transformation or a more carefully managed form of developmental continuity. Understanding the architecture of China's climate governance is therefore not an ancillary scholarly concern but a matter of direct consequence for global climate outcomes, regional development trajectories, and the evolving institutional landscape of international environmental cooperation.
At the heart of any serious analysis of China's climate policy is the tension between state-directed governance and market-based instruments. China's announcement of its dual carbon goals — carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — represented a dramatic elevation of climate ambition at the highest levels of political authority. Yet the mechanisms through which these goals are to be realized reveal the complexity and internal contradictions of China's governance model. The national emissions trading system, launched in 2021 and initially covering the power sector, was widely heralded as a market-oriented breakthrough. In practice, however, the system has operated under conditions of abundant free allowances, limited price signals, and weak enforcement, reflecting the enduring reluctance of central and local authorities to impose costs that might slow industrial output. The article's framing of climate policy through the lens of transition, governance, and market speaks directly to this problem: the transition China is undertaking is not simply a technological one but a political and institutional one, in which existing governance structures — including the fragmented authority between central ministries, local governments, and state-owned enterprises — both enable and constrain the pace of change.
The governance dimension is particularly illuminating when examined alongside China's broader experience of developmental statecraft. Scholars of the Chinese political economy have long observed that policy implementation in China is mediated through a multilevel principal-agent structure in which central mandates are frequently diluted, redirected, or captured by subnational interests. Climate policy is no exception. Local governments, historically evaluated on the basis of GDP growth and industrial employment, have had limited incentive to internalize environmental externalities. The central government has attempted to address this through the integration of environmental performance metrics into cadre evaluation systems and through the designation of green development as a core component of the broader "ecological civilization" (生态文明) agenda. Yet the administrative and fiscal resources required to enforce these mandates at scale remain unevenly distributed, and the political will to impose real costs on powerful industrial constituencies has often been insufficient. The article's focus on governance as a distinct analytical category — rather than treating it as merely the institutional background to market and technology debates — is therefore a significant contribution to a literature that has sometimes underestimated how deeply political the climate transition actually is.
The market dimension of China's climate policy connects to broader global debates about the role of carbon pricing, green finance, and private capital in decarbonization. China has pursued an ambitious green finance agenda, including the development of green bond standards, mandatory environmental information disclosure for listed companies, and the People's Bank of China's integration of climate risk into monetary policy frameworks. These initiatives have attracted considerable international attention and have positioned China as a significant actor in the emerging global green finance architecture. At the same time, questions persist about the quality and integrity of green financial instruments, the additionality of green bonds relative to business-as-usual financing, and the degree to which green finance has actually redirected capital toward genuinely low-carbon activities. From an ODA and development finance perspective, these questions carry additional weight because China's overseas lending through the Belt and Road Initiative has increasingly come under scrutiny for its carbon footprint and its alignment — or misalignment — with host-country climate goals. The article's engagement with market mechanisms thus necessarily opens onto questions not only of domestic climate governance but of China's role as a development financier and its evolving environmental conditionality standards.
For researchers and practitioners working in the fields of ODA, civil society, and global political economy, the significance of this article extends well beyond the boundaries of China studies. First, it raises fundamental questions about the transferability of governance models across national and regional contexts. China's climate governance approach — characterized by strong central directives, extensive state ownership of key industries, and selective use of market instruments — is not easily replicated in countries with different institutional endowments, even where there is political will to pursue comparable ambitions. Development partners and international organizations working to support climate transitions in lower-income countries must therefore engage carefully with the conditions under which different governance approaches succeed or fail, rather than assuming that the instruments deployed in China can be transplanted wholesale. Second, the article speaks to the evolving relationship between state authority and civil society in climate governance. Unlike many high-income democracies where environmental non-governmental organizations, subnational governments, and private sector actors play prominent roles in shaping and implementing climate policy, China's governance model assigns a much more circumscribed role to non-state actors. This raises important questions about the long-term resilience and legitimacy of climate transitions that are driven primarily by administrative fiat rather than by broad societal coalitions. The comparative political economy of climate governance — examining when and why different configurations of state, market, and civil society actors produce more or less effective outcomes — remains a rich and underexplored area for future research.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by at least three intersecting dynamics. The first is the evolution of China's domestic political economy under Xi Jinping's leadership, which has emphasized state control, party authority, and national security in ways that both reinforce and complicate the climate agenda. The renewed emphasis on energy security following geopolitical disruptions — including those stemming from Russia's war in Ukraine — has created new pressures to maintain or expand domestic coal production even as renewable capacity grows, producing a complex layering of competing energy and climate imperatives. The second dynamic is the evolving international context, including the trajectory of US-China competition, the prospects for renewed multilateral climate cooperation, and the pressures on China to align its overseas development financing with global climate commitments. The third is the internal political economy of China's industrial transition, including the capacity of affected workers and communities to absorb the dislocations associated with decarbonization and the political sustainability of a transition that imposes significant short-term costs on powerful constituencies. Scholarship that, like this article, takes seriously the interplay of transition, governance, and market forces in China's climate policy will be essential for navigating these dynamics with analytical rigor and intellectual honesty. The stakes — for China, for the global climate, and for the development trajectories of countries across the Global South — could hardly be higher.