Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-16
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China navigates its climate commitments has emerged as one of the defining challenges of twenty-first century global governance. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of its most ambitious deployers of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a structurally contradictory position in international climate politics. The country accounts for roughly twenty-eight percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, yet it has also installed more solar and wind capacity than any other nation and maintains a stated commitment to reaching peak emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Understanding how these commitments are translated — or not translated — into coherent domestic policy requires close attention to the specific institutional arrangements, market mechanisms, and governance logics that shape China's climate trajectory. The article under examination in the Journal of Contemporary Asia intervenes at precisely this intersection, probing the political economy of China's climate transition and the governance architecture through which market-based instruments are being deployed, contested, and reshaped.
At the core of scholarly inquiry into China's climate governance is a tension that resists simple resolution: the Chinese state simultaneously acts as the principal driver of decarbonization ambition and as a protector of carbon-intensive industries that remain central to employment, regional development, and political stability. China's national Emissions Trading System, launched in 2021 after years of regional pilot programs, represents the most architecturally visible expression of the market-governance synthesis the article likely interrogates. The ETS covers the power sector and is intended to expand to cover steel, cement, chemicals, and other heavy industries in successive phases. Yet analysts have consistently noted that the scheme's initial carbon price levels were set far below those required to induce significant behavioral change, and that free allowance allocations to covered enterprises have blunted the market signal that the instrument is theoretically designed to send. This points to a broader pattern in Chinese environmental governance wherein market mechanisms are introduced not to replace state direction but to supplement it, operating within a tightly managed political economy in which local governments, state-owned enterprises, and central regulators navigate competing incentive structures. The governance question, then, is not simply whether market tools work in isolation but how they function as one layer within a stratified system of administrative command, political negotiation, and economic planning.
The regional and global dimensions of China's climate transition carry significant implications for development finance and the international ODA architecture. China's Belt and Road Initiative has long been criticized for financing coal power plants and carbon-intensive infrastructure in the Global South, yet since 2021 Beijing has formally committed to ending public financing for overseas coal projects. This policy shift, announced at the UN General Assembly, was welcomed by international climate advocates but has been followed with considerable ambiguity in implementation, as Chinese policy banks and state enterprises continue to navigate existing project commitments, renegotiate terms, and reorient toward renewable energy exports. For recipient countries in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, China's pivot carries dual implications: it offers a potential source of green infrastructure financing that multilateral development banks have struggled to deploy at scale, but it also reflects a Chinese national interest in exporting solar panels, battery technology, and electric vehicles — sectors in which Chinese firms now hold commanding competitive positions. The development finance implications are therefore bound up with questions of industrial policy, technology transfer, and the extent to which green BRI commitments translate into genuine energy access improvements for host communities rather than simply new dependencies on Chinese supply chains.
The governance and civil society dimensions of China's domestic climate transition deserve particular attention from researchers working at the intersection of political economy and development studies. Unlike in many democratic contexts, China's environmental policymaking does not proceed through open deliberation among competing organized interests. Environmental nongovernmental organizations operate in a constrained space defined by the 2017 Overseas NGO Management Law and heightened state scrutiny of civil society since the mid-2010s. Yet civil society is not absent from China's climate politics: domestic environmental groups, academic think tanks affiliated with state research institutions, and provincial-level environmental bureaus all play roles in shaping the interpretation and implementation of national climate targets. International civil society engagement with China's climate policy occurs largely through track-two diplomacy, academic exchange, and the work of organizations like the Energy Foundation China, which funds domestic research and advocacy aligned with the state's own decarbonization agenda. This configuration — in which civil society operates as a technical partner and policy interpreter rather than an adversarial watchdog — has important implications for how the concept of climate governance travels across political contexts, and for whether the models China develops can or should serve as templates for other state-led development transitions.
The policy and research significance of China's climate governance trajectory extends well beyond the country's borders. As international climate finance discussions increasingly center on the role of development banks, carbon markets, and loss-and-damage mechanisms in the post-Paris architecture, China's experience with domestic carbon trading, green bond issuance, and industrial transition policy offers a large-scale empirical case with direct lessons for emerging market economies contemplating their own decarbonization pathways. For practitioners in ODA and development cooperation, the question of whether and how to engage with China's climate transition — whether as a partner, a standard-setter, or a competing model of development — will shape the design of climate-conditioned aid programs, just transition funds, and South-South cooperation arrangements for years to come. The scholarly contribution of rigorous political economy analysis of China's climate institutions lies in its capacity to move beyond both celebratory narratives of Chinese green leadership and dismissive accounts of greenwashing, toward a granular understanding of the specific conditions under which state-market hybrids deliver or fail to deliver meaningful emissions reductions.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by at least three interacting pressures that researchers and practitioners should track closely. First, the pace and political sustainability of industrial restructuring in coal-dependent provinces like Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang will determine whether central government commitments translate into subnational implementation or produce the kind of compliance gaps that have historically plagued Chinese environmental enforcement. Second, the evolution of carbon border adjustment mechanisms — particularly the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which entered its transitional phase in 2023 — will introduce new external trade pressures on Chinese exporters that may accelerate domestic carbon pricing reforms in ways that domestic political economy alone has not compelled. Third, and perhaps most consequential for the international community, how China positions itself in global climate finance negotiations — including whether it accepts greater obligations as a provider of climate finance to vulnerable nations — will test the durability of its self-identification as a developing country and reshape the normative architecture of international climate responsibility. For researchers at institutions focused on civil society and global development, these dynamics offer a rich agenda that sits squarely at the frontier of political economy, governance studies, and development theory.