Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-09
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases governs its own energy transition has moved from the periphery to the center of global climate politics. China's trajectory on climate change is no longer simply a domestic concern; it constitutes one of the most consequential variables in determining whether the international community can meet the temperature thresholds set by the Paris Agreement. As the country simultaneously operates as the leading global manufacturer of solar panels and wind turbines, the world's most carbon-intensive major economy, and an increasingly assertive actor in multilateral climate forums, the analytical challenge is to understand how these contradictions are managed — and sometimes exploited — within a distinctive model of party-state governance. Scholarship published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on China's climate policy, engaging the intertwined themes of transition, governance, and market, addresses precisely this constellation of tensions, and does so at a moment when both Chinese domestic politics and the broader architecture of global climate finance are undergoing significant stress.
Central to understanding China's climate governance is the recognition that the state does not operate as a unitary actor in this domain. The formal commitment to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 — the so-called "dual carbon" goals announced by President Xi Jinping in 2020 — represents a top-level political commitment of considerable weight. Yet the translation of this commitment into coherent policy across China's vast and economically heterogeneous provincial landscape has proven far more complicated. Provincial governments face deeply entrenched incentive structures that reward GDP growth and employment preservation, particularly in coal-dependent inland regions where alternative economic development pathways remain limited. The governance challenge, then, is not simply one of administrative implementation but of recalibrating the political economy of local development in ways that align subnational interests with central policy directives. Scholarship in this tradition draws attention to how central planning instruments — including binding energy intensity targets, performance evaluations for local officials, and sectoral production quotas — interact with, and sometimes conflict with, the market mechanisms that Beijing has simultaneously sought to cultivate as efficiency-enhancing tools for the transition.
The launch of China's national emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2021 marked a significant institutional development, representing the largest carbon market by covered emissions in the world. Yet the market has faced persistent questions about its depth, liquidity, and the integrity of underlying data systems. The tension between market-based instruments and China's characteristic reliance on administrative command structures is analytically revealing. Markets require credible price signals, transparent reporting, and enforcement mechanisms that are largely insulated from political interference — conditions that sit uncomfortably alongside the institutional logic of a system in which the Communist Party retains ultimate authority over economic management. The ETS has, in practice, operated more as a compliance mechanism than a genuine price discovery instrument, with allowance prices remaining too low to drive significant abatement investment beyond what regulatory mandates already require. How analysts characterize this gap between institutional form and functional substance has significant implications for assessing whether China's market governance approach is evolving toward greater sophistication or remains largely cosmetic.
From the perspective of global political economy and ODA research, China's climate transition carries implications that extend well beyond its own borders. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and related development financing mechanisms, China has served as a major financier of energy infrastructure across the Global South. The composition of that portfolio — long criticized for its heavy reliance on coal-fired power — has become a site of considerable international pressure, and Beijing has responded with rhetorical and, to a degree, operational commitments to greening its overseas financing. The 2021 pledge to halt the construction of new coal-fired power projects abroad represented a notable policy shift, though its implementation has been uneven and the transition toward renewable energy financing has proceeded at varying speeds across different partner countries. For scholars working on development finance and ODA, this evolution raises important questions about conditionality, recipient country energy planning, and the extent to which China's bilateral development model is converging with, or continuing to diverge from, established DAC-norm frameworks. Civil society organizations and multilateral institutions monitoring these flows face significant analytical challenges in assessing the net climate impact of Chinese overseas energy investment.
Looking forward, the research and policy community faces several critical uncertainties that the study of China's climate governance must engage. The geopolitical decoupling between China and Western economies has begun to complicate the transfer of climate technologies and the coordination of climate finance, raising risks of fragmented parallel systems rather than the unified multilateral architecture that effective climate action arguably requires. At the same time, China's extraordinary buildout of domestic renewable energy capacity — with wind and solar installations consistently exceeding official targets — suggests that the economic logic of the transition is becoming increasingly self-reinforcing, even as coal consumption has proven more persistent than optimistic scenarios anticipated. For practitioners in development organizations, civil society, and climate finance, the central task is to develop analytical frameworks capable of distinguishing genuine structural transition from policy performance, and to identify the leverage points — institutional, financial, and diplomatic — through which international engagement can constructively accompany rather than simply critique China's evolving governance of one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century.