Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-07
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's approach to climate governance has become one of the most consequential variables in global efforts to manage the transition away from fossil fuels, not only because the country is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases but because its domestic policy choices increasingly shape the terms on which developing and middle-income economies negotiate their own energy futures. As the international community moves further from the Paris Agreement's initial ambitions and into a period defined by geopolitical fragmentation, supply chain competition, and uneven implementation of net-zero pledges, understanding how Beijing actually governs its climate transition—rather than how it is portrayed in either alarmist or celebratory Western commentary—has become essential for scholars of comparative political economy and for practitioners working in adjacent fields such as overseas development assistance and green finance. The article under review, appearing in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses this need directly by examining the interplay of transition, governance, and market mechanisms that together constitute China's distinctive model of climate policymaking.
The analytical core of the piece lies in its treatment of China's climate policy not as a monolithic top-down directive but as a layered governance system in which central planning targets, provincial implementation incentives, and increasingly sophisticated market instruments interact—often unevenly—to produce outcomes that diverge from official targets in both directions. This framing pushes back against two common misreadings: the view that China's climate commitments are largely symbolic gestures subordinate to growth imperatives, and the opposite view that a centralized authoritarian state can simply will decarbonization into being through administrative fiat. Instead, the article situates China's "dual carbon" goals—peaking emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060—within a governance architecture that must reconcile competing pressures from local governments dependent on carbon-intensive industry for revenue and employment, state-owned enterprises with entrenched interests in coal and heavy manufacturing, and a national leadership increasingly attentive to both energy security and the diplomatic capital that climate leadership confers. The result is a transition that proceeds through experimentation, target-responsibility systems, and the gradual expansion of carbon markets, rather than through a single coherent policy instrument.
This governance-centered analysis resonates with broader debates in the political economy literature on state capitalism and the developmental state, particularly the question of whether hybrid market-state arrangements can deliver structural transformation as effectively as either pure market liberalization or classical central planning. China's national emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021 and still maturing relative to the European Union's more established system, exemplifies this hybridity: it introduces price signals and market discipline into carbon-intensive sectors while remaining embedded within a regulatory apparatus that retains extensive discretion over allocation, sectoral coverage, and enforcement. For scholars of Asian political economy, this pattern is familiar from China's earlier experiences with market-oriented reform in banking, land, and industrial policy, where liberalization has consistently been sequenced and bounded by state control rather than pursued as an end in itself. Read comparatively, China's climate transition thus offers a further data point in ongoing debates about whether "state-guided marketization" constitutes a durable and exportable model or a transitional arrangement that will eventually yield to either fuller marketization or renewed recentralization under conditions of economic or geopolitical stress.
The implications extend well beyond China's borders, particularly for the countries and civil society actors that make up the core constituencies of institutions like IOCSS. China's domestic energy transition is now inseparable from its role as the world's dominant supplier of solar panels, batteries, and critical minerals processing capacity, meaning that the pace and character of its decarbonization directly shape the cost and availability of green technology for developing countries pursuing their own climate and development goals. At the same time, China's overseas lending and infrastructure investment—including the evolving posture of the Belt and Road Initiative toward renewable energy rather than coal-fired power—illustrates how domestic governance choices ripple outward into the ODA and development finance landscape, creating both opportunities for cheaper renewable deployment in recipient countries and new dependencies on Chinese supply chains and financing terms. Civil society organizations and multilateral development actors monitoring environmental and social safeguards in recipient countries must therefore track not only project-level outcomes but also the shifting domestic political economy that determines which technologies, financing structures, and environmental standards Chinese state and quasi-state actors export.
From a policy standpoint, the article's governance-focused lens suggests that external actors—whether Western governments, multilateral institutions, or civil society coalitions—should temper expectations that diplomatic pressure alone can accelerate China's transition, given that domestic bureaucratic bargaining and local fiscal incentives are at least as consequential as international commitments in determining implementation speed. This has practical implications for how development and climate finance institutions calibrate engagement: technical cooperation on carbon market design, subnational capacity building, and data transparency may yield more durable results than headline-level diplomatic agreements. It also underscores the importance of comparative research examining how other large emerging economies—India, Indonesia, Brazil—are constructing their own hybrid governance arrangements for energy transition, since China's experience may prove less a unique case than an early instance of a broader pattern among state-capitalist developing economies navigating decarbonization under conditions of continued reliance on carbon-intensive growth.
Looking ahead, researchers and practitioners alike would benefit from closer attention to the subnational and sectoral variation within China's climate governance system, since aggregate national targets obscure significant divergence in implementation across provinces with different industrial structures, fiscal capacities, and political incentives. As China's carbon market expands in scope and as its green industrial policy increasingly intersects with trade tensions over solar, battery, and electric vehicle exports, the boundary between climate policy and industrial or geopolitical strategy will continue to blur. For the development and civil society community, the task ahead is to build the analytical and monitoring capacity needed to track these entangled dynamics in real time, ensuring that engagement with China's climate transition—whether through trade, finance, or diplomacy—is grounded in an accurate understanding of how that transition is actually governed, rather than in simplified narratives of either authoritarian efficiency or empty pledge-making.