Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-10
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's position as both the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its dominant manufacturer of renewable energy technology places its climate policy at the center of global efforts to manage the energy transition. As the international community grapples with the widening gap between the Paris Agreement's temperature targets and actual emissions trajectories, understanding how Beijing designs, governs, and operationalizes its climate commitments has become essential not only for climate diplomacy but for the broader architecture of global political economy. The article "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses this question by examining the interplay among three forces that shape China's approach: the structural imperatives of energy transition, the institutional mechanisms of governance that translate policy into practice, and the market instruments increasingly deployed to allocate the costs and benefits of decarbonization. This framing is significant because it moves beyond the common tendency in Western commentary to treat Chinese climate policy as either a monolithic state directive or a simple extension of authoritarian control, instead foregrounding the negotiated, multi-scalar, and often contested nature of environmental governance within a system that combines strong central authority with substantial local and sectoral variation.
The analytical core of such scholarship typically centers on the tension between top-down planning targets, articulated through five-year plans, dual carbon goals, and sector-specific mandates, and the bottom-up realities of implementation across provinces, state-owned enterprises, and increasingly private and foreign capital. China's climate governance has evolved from a relatively centralized command-and-control model toward a hybrid system that incorporates market-based instruments, most visibly the national Emissions Trading Scheme launched in 2021, alongside continued reliance on administrative quotas, industrial policy subsidies, and local cadre performance evaluations tied to environmental outcomes. This hybridization reflects a broader pattern in Chinese economic governance since the reform era: the state does not simply withdraw in favor of markets but actively constructs and calibrates market mechanisms to serve strategic objectives, whether those are decarbonization, industrial upgrading, or the cultivation of national champions in solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing. The article's attention to governance as a distinct analytical category, separate from transition and market, usefully highlights how institutional design choices, such as the allocation of authority between the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the National Development and Reform Commission, and provincial governments, shape outcomes as much as the substantive climate targets themselves.
These dynamics resonate strongly with broader regional trends in ODA, civil society, and political economy across Asia and the Global South. China's domestic climate governance model increasingly informs its external engagement, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative's shift toward greener financing commitments and the export of renewable energy technology and standards to developing countries. This positions China simultaneously as a normative competitor to traditional Western-led climate finance architectures, such as the Green Climate Fund and bilateral OECD-DAC climate ODA, and as a potential partner for developing countries seeking rapid decarbonization pathways that do not replicate the conditionality-laden frameworks of Bretton Woods institutions. For civil society organizations operating across Asia, China's model raises complex questions about the space available for independent environmental advocacy, given that domestic Chinese climate governance affords limited room for autonomous civil society mobilization compared to the participatory frameworks promoted by many international development actors. This creates a notable divergence in how "good governance" is defined and operationalized in climate contexts, one that has implications for how recipient countries in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America navigate between Chinese-style state-led green industrial policy and Western-style civil-society-embedded climate governance.
The policy implications of this research extend into several practical domains relevant to development practitioners and policymakers. First, the coexistence of market instruments and administrative control in China's carbon market suggests that binary framings of "market versus state" are analytically insufficient for understanding contemporary climate governance, a lesson with relevance beyond China for countries designing their own emissions trading systems or carbon pricing mechanisms. Second, the uneven implementation of climate targets across Chinese provinces, driven by divergent local economic structures and cadre incentives, offers a cautionary case study for any government or international body assuming that national-level climate commitments translate smoothly into subnational compliance. Third, and perhaps most significantly for the ODA and development finance community, China's dual role as both a major source of climate-relevant investment and a systemic emitter complicates conventional donor-recipient categorizations, requiring more sophisticated analytical frameworks that can account for a state that is simultaneously a climate policy innovator, a fossil fuel consumer, and an increasingly influential shaper of global green technology supply chains.
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners alike should attend closely to how China's evolving governance architecture, particularly the maturation of its carbon market and the recalibration of central-local relations around environmental targets, interacts with its external economic diplomacy. As China deepens its role in green technology exports and climate-related development finance, the domestic governance choices examined in this article are likely to have increasingly transnational consequences, shaping not only China's own decarbonization trajectory but the institutional templates available to other developing and middle-income countries. For scholars of comparative political economy, this suggests a research agenda that treats Chinese climate governance not as an isolated national case but as an evolving model whose internal contradictions and adaptations offer broader lessons about the possibilities and limits of state-market hybridity in addressing the climate crisis. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society sectors, the challenge will be to engage constructively with China's growing climate leadership while maintaining critical attention to the governance trade-offs, particularly around transparency, accountability, and civic participation, that distinguish its approach from other models of climate action.