Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-21
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 its most ambitious deployers of renewable energy, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate politics — indispensable to any meaningful solution yet operating through institutional frameworks that remain poorly understood by outside observers. This article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when that paradox is sharpening: the post-Paris architecture of voluntary national commitments has entered its first serious reckoning, and the credibility of major emitters, China foremost among them, is under heightened scrutiny. For scholars of Asian political economy and practitioners engaged in climate governance, understanding how China is navigating the intersection of policy transition, institutional reform, and market design is no longer a matter of academic interest alone — it is operationally urgent.
The framing of China's climate policy through the triple lens of transition, governance, and market reflects an analytical sophistication that much earlier scholarship lacked. For too long, Western commentary treated China's climate posture as a binary: either a cynical free-rider on international agreements or a newly converted green hegemon. Neither characterization survived contact with the institutional complexity on the ground. What the Journal of Contemporary Asia piece engages is the far messier reality — a state that has embedded ambitious decarbonization targets within a developmental governance model that still prioritizes industrial output, energy security, and employment in legacy sectors. The transition is genuine, but it is mediated through party-state mechanisms that do not separate economic planning from political legitimacy calculations in the way that liberal market economies nominally do. Governance, in this context, is not simply a technical delivery problem; it is a site of contested authority between central ministries, provincial governments, state-owned energy enterprises, and an emergent private clean-technology sector whose interests only partially align.
The market dimension of China's climate governance is particularly significant and often underappreciated in comparative policy literature. China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021 and covering the power sector, represents the largest carbon market by volume in the world, yet its price signals have historically been too weak to drive the accelerated fuel-switching that climate targets require. The tension identified in scholarship on this theme — between a state that wants markets to do the heavy lifting of decarbonization while retaining administrative levers over key outcomes — is not unique to China, but it is especially acute there given the scale of state ownership in the energy system. The gradual expansion of the ETS to cover steel, cement, and aluminum, sectors where China's global market share is enormous, will test whether the governance architecture can withstand the distributional pressures that carbon pricing inevitably generates. Provincial governments in coal-dependent regions have consistently sought to soften compliance burdens, and the central government's willingness or ability to override those preferences will be a key indicator of institutional maturity in the years ahead.
Situating China's domestic climate governance within the broader landscape of development finance and ODA adds a further layer of analytical importance. China's overseas investment through Belt and Road Initiative channels has historically been tilted toward fossil fuel infrastructure, though this composition has shifted notably since the 2021 pledge to cease financing new coal projects abroad. For development practitioners and civil society organizations engaged in recipient countries — particularly across South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America — the governance norms that China exports alongside its capital matter enormously. If domestic governance reforms toward more transparent carbon pricing, independent environmental monitoring, and civil society participation in impact assessment gain traction within China, there is at least a plausible pathway through which those norms could diffuse outward through financial conditionalities and technical cooperation agreements. The reverse is equally possible: a China that manages its domestic transition through opaque administrative commands may extend exactly that model to its international financing operations, crowding out more participatory and accountable governance approaches.
Looking forward, the research agenda opened by this kind of analysis is both rich and practically consequential. Scholars working at the intersection of comparative political economy, environmental governance, and development studies will need to track whether China's evolving climate institutions are producing durable regulatory capacity or merely adaptive responses to international reputational pressures. For policymakers and civil society actors engaging China in multilateral climate forums — from COP negotiations to Just Energy Transition Partnerships — the distinction matters because it determines whether commitments made at the international level are backed by domestic enforcement mechanisms capable of delivering them. The years between now and 2030, when China's own peak emissions target falls due, will function as a critical test of the governance model described in this scholarship. Whether the interplay of transition ambition, institutional improvisation, and market experimentation produces an outcome consistent with the Paris temperature goals is a question that no serious analyst of Asian political economy, ODA architecture, or global climate governance can afford to answer from a distance.