Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-06
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's response to the climate crisis has become one of the defining variables in global political economy, and any serious scholarly treatment of the subject arrives at a moment of unusual urgency. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China occupies a paradoxical position: it is both the chief obstacle to decarbonization targets under the Paris Agreement and the chief supplier of the technologies that make decarbonization possible elsewhere. This tension between environmental burden and industrial opportunity forms the backdrop against which the article "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, situates its inquiry. By foregrounding the triad of transition, governance, and market, the piece signals an analytical ambition that goes beyond simply cataloguing emissions targets or renewable energy statistics, instead probing the institutional architecture that determines whether China's stated commitments translate into durable structural change.
The core analytical value of framing Chinese climate policy through transition, governance, and market lies in its refusal to treat decarbonization as a purely technical or engineering problem. Transition implies a temporal and structural process — the shift away from coal-dependent industrial production and toward a economy organized around renewable energy, electrified transport, and green manufacturing — but this process is neither linear nor automatically self-executing. It is contingent on governance arrangements that mediate between the central state's ambitious "dual carbon" goals (peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060) and the fragmented, often contradictory incentives facing provincial and municipal governments, many of which remain fiscally dependent on carbon-intensive industries, land sales, and energy-intensive growth models. This vertical tension between central planning and local implementation has long been recognized as a defining feature of Chinese environmental governance more broadly, and its persistence in the climate domain suggests that the effectiveness of China's transition cannot be read off from Beijing's pronouncements alone. The market dimension adds a further layer of complexity: China has constructed the world's largest national carbon emissions trading scheme, yet its price signals remain comparatively weak, its sectoral coverage incomplete, and its interaction with administrative quota systems and state-owned enterprise dominance raises questions about whether market mechanisms in China function according to the logics familiar from European or North American carbon markets, or whether they instead operate as an extension of state-directed industrial policy under a different institutional label.
These dynamics resonate well beyond China's borders and speak directly to broader debates within development studies and political economy concerning the compatibility of authoritarian developmentalism with ecological transformation. For decades, scholarship on East Asian political economy has debated whether the "developmental state" model — characterized by close coordination between bureaucratic elites and favored industries — could be redirected toward environmental ends as effectively as it was once directed toward export-led industrialization. China's experience offers perhaps the most consequential test case of this proposition, and its outcomes carry implications for how other middle-income and rapidly industrializing states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America conceive of their own energy transitions. For civil society and ODA-focused institutions, this matters acutely: much of the Global South's renewable energy infrastructure — from solar farms in Southeast Asia to hydropower and grid projects across Africa — is now financed, manufactured, or constructed with Chinese capital and technology, often through Belt and Road-adjacent arrangements that blur the line between commercial investment and state-driven development assistance. Understanding the governance logic that shapes China's domestic climate transition therefore has direct bearing on understanding the terms under which climate-related development finance and technology transfer are extended abroad.
The policy implications of this analysis are significant for both domestic Chinese reform trajectories and the international governance of climate finance. If China's carbon market continues to function primarily as an administrative tool for meeting centrally set targets rather than as a genuine price-discovery mechanism, then international observers and trading partners should recalibrate their expectations about the market's capacity to send credible investment signals or to be linked with other emissions trading systems in the manner sometimes proposed for global carbon pricing architecture. Similarly, the persistent tension between central climate ambition and local implementation capacity suggests that international climate finance and technical assistance directed at China — while comparatively modest given China's own financial capacity — might be more usefully redirected toward strengthening subnational monitoring, verification, and enforcement institutions rather than reinforcing national-level target-setting, which is already robust. For researchers and practitioners engaged with ODA and civil society development in the Global South, the Chinese case also underscores the importance of scrutinizing the governance conditions attached to climate-related infrastructure financing, since the same central-local frictions and market-versus-administrative tensions observed within China are frequently reproduced, in modified form, in recipient countries hosting Chinese-financed energy projects.
Looking forward, scholars and practitioners tracking China's climate trajectory would do well to move beyond binary assessments of whether China is "doing enough" and instead attend to the granular institutional mechanics that this article foregrounds — the specific ways in which transition targets, governance capacities, and market instruments interact, reinforce, or undermine one another over time. As China's own economic growth model faces headwinds from real estate contraction, demographic decline, and trade tensions with Western economies, the political salience of climate policy as a vehicle for industrial upgrading and export competitiveness is likely to intensify rather than diminish. This suggests that future research should pay close attention to how China's green industrial strategy — encompassing battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, and renewable equipment exports — becomes entangled with its climate governance apparatus, potentially producing a form of decarbonization driven as much by mercantilist industrial ambition as by environmental conviction. For the broader community of scholars working on ODA, civil society, and global political economy, this entanglement represents fertile and urgent terrain, since it will shape not only China's own emissions trajectory but the technological and financial conditions under which much of the developing world pursues its own energy futures.