Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-13
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases manages its own climate transition has become one of the most consequential puzzles in contemporary international relations. China's trajectory on climate policy is not merely a domestic governance matter; it is structurally embedded in the broader architecture of global climate finance, development assistance, and multilateral environmental diplomacy. As the international community reckons with the accelerating pace of climate change against a backdrop of geopolitical fragmentation, understanding the internal dynamics of China's policy environment — the tensions between state authority, market instruments, and institutional reform — has emerged as a foundational concern for scholars of Asian political economy and practitioners working across the development and ODA landscape. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engages precisely this terrain, examining how China's climate policy is being reshaped at the intersection of governance transformation and emerging market mechanisms.
At the heart of the article's analytical contribution is an interrogation of the conceptual category of "transition" as it applies to China's energy and emissions governance. The dominant framing in Western policy discourse often treats energy transition as a linear and largely techno-economic process — the substitution of fossil fuel infrastructure for renewable alternatives driven by cost curves and investment flows. What a closer reading of China's governance context reveals is something considerably more complex. China's climate commitments, codified in its Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement and elaborated through successive Five-Year Plans, are mediated by a layered institutional architecture in which central directives interact uneasily with provincial implementation capacities, local economic interests, and the enduring political weight of the coal sector. The article appears to argue that this institutional heterogeneity does not simply represent a governance deficit to be overcome, but rather constitutes a structural feature of China's political economy that any serious analysis of climate transition must incorporate.
The role of market mechanisms in China's climate governance deserves particular attention. The launch of China's national carbon emissions trading scheme in 2021 represented a landmark development — the creation of the world's largest carbon market by coverage of emissions, initially focused on the power sector and subsequently expanded. Yet the scholarly literature has been cautious about the depth of this market's functionality. Carbon prices in China's ETS have remained relatively low compared to the European Union's Emissions Trading System, and the allocation methodology — which relies substantially on benchmarked free allowances rather than auctioning — has been critiqued for insufficient price signals to drive meaningful abatement investment. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article, situated within a political economy tradition that takes seriously the relationship between market design and state power, likely contributes to this debate by probing how the architecture of China's carbon market reflects not simply technical choices but deliberate governance decisions about the acceptable pace of industrial adjustment and the management of distributional conflict. This is a critical lens: market instruments in authoritarian developmental states do not operate as pure price mechanisms but as hybrid tools that must serve multiple policy objectives simultaneously.
The broader regional and global implications of China's climate governance approach are substantial. China's Belt and Road Initiative has long been scrutinized for its carbon footprint, particularly the financing of coal-fired power generation in recipient countries across South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, however, there has been a documented shift in the composition of BRI energy financing toward renewables — solar and wind — partly in response to international pressure and partly reflecting China's own industrial interests in dominating the global supply chain for clean energy equipment. This shift represents a significant moment for the ODA community: as China repositions itself as a provider of green infrastructure finance, the governance frameworks, conditionality norms, and accountability standards attached to that finance will shape the climate trajectories of dozens of developing countries. Understanding the domestic governance architecture that produces China's external climate posture is therefore not merely an academic exercise — it is directly relevant to how development practitioners, civil society organizations, and recipient governments engage with Chinese finance.
The policy implications of the article's framework are several. For scholars of comparative climate governance, the China case offers a critical counterpoint to liberal market assumptions embedded in much of the climate economics literature, demonstrating that ambitious emission reduction targets can be pursued through a combination of administrative mandates, industrial policy, and selectively deployed market instruments without converging on Western regulatory models. For practitioners and policymakers in the ODA and international development community, the article reinforces the importance of engaging with China's climate governance as a system characterized by internal contestation and strategic adaptation rather than monolithic state command. Civil society actors, international NGOs, and multilateral institutions seeking to influence China's climate behavior — whether through dialogue, co-financing, or standards-setting — will be more effective if they develop nuanced understandings of how power is distributed and negotiated within China's environmental bureaucracy. Looking forward, as China approaches its 2030 carbon peaking commitment and the longer-term 2060 carbon neutrality target, the governance and market dimensions analyzed in this article will only grow in significance. The choices made in the coming years regarding the depth of carbon market reform, the political management of coal-sector decline, and the governance standards attached to outbound green finance will reverberate far beyond China's borders, shaping the texture of the global climate transition for decades to come.