Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-08
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's climate policy landscape has become one of the most consequential variables in global efforts to manage the transition away from fossil fuels, and understanding its internal governance dynamics is no longer a matter of specialist interest but a central question for development economists, ODA practitioners, and students of comparative political economy alike. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the dominant manufacturer of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, China occupies a paradoxical position: it is both the chief obstacle to and the chief enabler of a global low-carbon transition. This tension has intensified since the mid-2020s as Western industrial policy has pivoted toward "de-risking" supply chains from Chinese dependence, even as multilateral climate negotiations continue to rely on Beijing's cooperation to meet global mitigation targets. Against this backdrop, the article "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, offers a timely and analytically rich examination of how China's domestic institutions, market structures, and governance arrangements are shaping the pace and character of its energy transition.
The core contribution of this piece lies in its treatment of climate policy not as a discrete regulatory domain but as an outcome of interlocking institutional pressures — the tension between central planning imperatives and provincial implementation autonomy, between state-owned enterprise dominance in energy production and the increasingly marketized dynamics of renewable technology manufacturing, and between top-down decarbonization targets and bottom-up developmental incentives that still favor coal-fired capacity in many regions. The article situates China's climate governance within the broader logic of the country's political economy, where the central government sets ambitious aggregate targets (carbon peaking by 2030, carbon neutrality by 2060) while leaving substantial discretion to provincial and municipal authorities whose fiscal health and employment priorities often remain tied to carbon-intensive industries. This produces what scholars of Chinese governance have long identified as a pattern of "fragmented authoritarianism," in which policy coherence at the top does not translate smoothly into uniform implementation on the ground. By foregrounding the market dimension — the article's attention to pricing mechanisms, subsidy regimes, and the competitive dynamics of the renewable energy sector — the analysis moves beyond a purely state-centric account and captures how market forces, including overcapacity in solar and battery manufacturing, are reshaping the incentive structures facing both firms and local governments.
These dynamics resonate strongly with broader trends across Asia and the Global South in ODA and development discourse. Many developing countries look to China not only as a source of concessional and non-concessional finance for energy infrastructure through vehicles like the Belt and Road Initiative, but increasingly as a supplier of low-cost renewable technology that is reshaping the economics of energy access in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. China's domestic governance choices — how it balances coal phase-down against energy security, how it manages the political economy of provincial debt tied to industrial subsidies, and how it structures its emissions trading scheme — have direct spillover effects on the availability and price of solar panels, batteries, and grid technologies that recipient countries depend upon for their own energy transitions. In this sense, China's climate governance is not merely a domestic Chinese story but a structural variable in the global political economy of development finance, one that intersects with debates about debt sustainability, technology transfer, and the terms on which Global South countries can pursue decarbonization without sacrificing growth objectives. The article's framing invites comparison with other authoritarian or hybrid-regime approaches to green industrial policy, including Vietnam and India, where similar tensions between central mandates and local implementation capacity shape transition outcomes.
The policy implications of this research are significant for multiple audiences. For international climate negotiators and multilateral institutions, the analysis underscores that engaging China effectively requires understanding the sub-national and market-level frictions that can undermine even well-intentioned central commitments — a caution against treating Beijing's climate pledges as a monolithic, self-executing policy. For development agencies and ODA practitioners designing climate finance and technical cooperation programs involving China, whether through South-South cooperation frameworks or trilateral partnerships, the governance fragmentation identified in the article suggests that provincial-level engagement and attention to local political economy incentives may be as important as national-level diplomatic agreements. For scholars of comparative political economy, the piece contributes to a growing literature that questions simplistic state-versus-market dichotomies in climate governance, showing instead how state direction and market competition are mutually constitutive in China's case — with the state creating markets through subsidy and mandate, and market competition subsequently generating overcapacity and price dynamics that feed back into state policy adjustments, such as recent efforts to curb "involutionary" competition among renewable manufacturers.
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners should watch closely how China navigates the next phase of its transition, particularly as it confronts the twin pressures of slowing economic growth and mounting international scrutiny of its continued coal capacity additions alongside its renewable energy buildout. The governance tensions this article identifies are unlikely to resolve neatly; if anything, they may sharpen as local governments grapple with fiscal stress and as global markets react to Chinese overcapacity through tariffs and trade restrictions, as seen in recent EU and US measures against Chinese solar and EV exports. For the ODA and civil society research community, this suggests fertile ground for further inquiry into how Chinese provincial governance patterns are replicated or adapted when Chinese firms and financing institutions operate in partner countries, and whether the fragmented, market-state hybrid model analyzed here offers lessons — cautionary or constructive — for other large emerging economies attempting to reconcile industrial policy ambitions with genuine decarbonization. As global climate governance increasingly depends on the credibility and consistency of major emitters' domestic institutions, studies of this kind provide indispensable groundwork for policymakers seeking to calibrate expectations and design more effective engagement strategies with China's evolving climate regime.