Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-20
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China navigates 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 its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate politics that defies simple categorization. The stakes extend well beyond China's borders: the pace, character, and institutional architecture of China's decarbonization effort will shape the trajectory of global warming, the competitiveness of international clean energy markets, and the structural alignment of development finance across Asia and the Global South. Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States — particularly in the domains of technology, trade, and multilateral norm-setting — understanding how China's climate governance actually functions, rather than how it is rhetorically framed, has become an urgent analytical priority for scholars, policymakers, and development practitioners alike.
The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" enters this conversation at a moment of considerable flux in China's domestic regulatory architecture. China's announcement of its dual carbon goals — carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — represented a landmark commitment that fundamentally reoriented the terms of climate diplomacy. Yet the gap between high-level declaratory policy and on-the-ground implementation has consistently been a central tension in Chinese governance studies, and climate policy is no exception. The article's framing around the interplay of transition, governance, and market signals an interest in unpacking precisely this gap: how does a centralized developmental state manage the coordination problems inherent in decarbonizing a vast, regionally differentiated economy, and to what extent does it rely on market mechanisms versus administrative command-and-control instruments to do so? These are questions that resonate far beyond China's case, touching on fundamental debates in comparative political economy about the state-market relationship in green transitions.
Central to the analytical contribution of work in this domain is the recognition that China's climate governance cannot be understood through a single institutional lens. The National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the National Energy Administration, and an array of provincial and municipal governments all exercise overlapping jurisdictions over energy, emissions, and industrial policy. This institutional fragmentation — well documented in the broader literature on Chinese bureaucratic politics — creates both opportunities and vulnerabilities in the transition process. On one hand, competitive federalism among provinces has historically driven economic dynamism, and there is evidence that similar dynamics have accelerated renewable energy deployment in certain coastal and interior regions. On the other hand, local governments with strong ties to legacy coal and heavy industrial sectors have frequently implemented national climate directives selectively or incrementally, generating significant variation in outcomes across provinces. The governance architecture of China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in earnest in 2021, exemplifies these tensions: designed as a market instrument to internalize the social cost of carbon, it has in practice operated with constrained price signals and limited sectoral coverage, reflecting the political economy of incumbent interests as much as any principled policy design.
The market dimension of China's climate policy also intersects in complex ways with the country's international economic footprint, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative and China's expanding role in development finance. For scholars and practitioners working in the ODA and civil society space, this intersection is especially consequential. Chinese state-directed finance has historically favored large-scale energy infrastructure in recipient countries, including coal-fired power generation, drawing sustained criticism from environmental civil society organizations and DAC donor governments. However, the post-2021 period has seen a measurable rhetorical and, in some instances, operational shift toward green financing commitments, with Chinese policy banks signaling reduced appetite for overseas coal projects. Whether this shift reflects durable institutional change or tactical repositioning in response to reputational pressure remains an open empirical question, but it carries profound implications for developing countries in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia that continue to face genuine infrastructure deficits and where the terms of climate conditionality in development finance are increasingly contested. Civil society organizations operating in these contexts must therefore engage not only with the domestic politics of climate governance in recipient countries but also with the evolving policy frameworks of China as a structural actor in the global development finance architecture.
Looking forward, several analytical and policy frontiers emerge from engagement with China's climate transition. The integration of carbon pricing into broader industrial policy — particularly as China seeks to protect emerging clean technology sectors from international competition while simultaneously pressing for market access abroad — will test the coherence of its climate governance framework and generate friction within multilateral trade and investment regimes. The role of subnational actors, including municipal governments and state-owned enterprises, deserves closer scholarly attention, as these entities are frequently the decisive implementation nodes in ways that aggregate national-level analysis can obscure. For researchers in development studies and civil society analysis, the Chinese case offers a provocative counterpoint to liberal institutional models of climate governance, raising questions about whether effective decarbonization requires democratic deliberation and robust civil society participation or whether developmental state capacity, however imperfect, can substitute for these features under conditions of urgency. Practitioners engaged in ODA programming, climate finance, and civil society capacity-building will need to develop more sophisticated analytical frameworks for engaging with Chinese governance actors — not as a monolithic external force but as a heterogeneous institutional landscape with internal contradictions, reform coalitions, and points of potential alignment with international sustainability norms. The scholarly work emerging from journals like the Journal of Contemporary Asia plays an indispensable role in building that analytical foundation.