Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-11
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's climate policy has moved from the periphery of its economic agenda to a central pillar of state strategy, and understanding its internal logic has become indispensable for anyone tracking global development finance, energy transitions, or the political economy of the Global South. As the world's largest emitter and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, China occupies a paradoxical position: it is both the chief obstacle to and the chief enabler of a global low-carbon transition. The article "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses this paradox by examining how China's climate governance apparatus has evolved to reconcile continued economic growth, energy security, and environmental commitments within an authoritarian developmental state. For researchers and practitioners at institutions like IOCSS who track how great powers shape the rules and financing of global development, this line of inquiry is not academic in the narrow sense—it bears directly on how ODA flows, technology transfers, and multilateral climate finance mechanisms will be structured in the coming decade.
The core analytical contribution of the piece, as its title suggests, lies in disaggregating "transition," "governance," and "market" as three distinct but interlocking dimensions of Chinese climate policy rather than treating decarbonization as a single, linear process. On the transition dimension, the article likely traces the shift from coal-dependent industrialization toward a hybrid energy system in which renewables, nuclear, and continued coal capacity coexist, reflecting Beijing's stated principle of "establishing the new before abolishing the old." This is a notable departure from the Western policy imagination of transition as wholesale substitution; China's approach is additive and sequenced, prioritizing energy security and grid stability over rapid fossil fuel phase-out. On governance, the analysis presumably foregrounds the centrality of the Chinese Communist Party's target-and-responsibility system, in which provincial and municipal officials are evaluated partly on emissions and energy-intensity metrics, alongside the increasingly influential role of the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in coordinating cross-sectoral policy. The market dimension, meanwhile, likely engages with the national carbon emissions trading scheme launched in 2021, assessing whether it functions as a genuine price-discovery mechanism or remains a state-guided instrument subordinated to industrial policy objectives—an ambiguity that has significant implications for how seriously international observers should treat Chinese carbon markets as a model or a partner mechanism for linkage.
These three dimensions cannot be understood in isolation from China's broader political economy, and this is where the article's significance extends well beyond a single-country case study. China's climate policy is deeply entangled with its industrial policy: the same state apparatus that sets emissions targets also subsidizes and directs capital toward strategic sectors like electric vehicles, battery manufacturing, and renewable energy equipment, producing overcapacity dynamics that have reshaped global supply chains and triggered trade tensions with the United States and European Union. This dual character—climate policy as both environmental governance and industrial strategy—illuminates why China has been able to achieve renewable deployment at a scale and speed unmatched elsewhere, while simultaneously using that dominance as a geoeconomic lever. For the Global South, this has concrete consequences: Chinese solar panels, batteries, and increasingly turnkey renewable energy projects financed through instruments adjacent to the Belt and Road Initiative are reshaping the terms on which developing countries access clean energy technology, often on more accessible terms than traditional OECD-DAC concessional finance but with different governance, transparency, and debt-sustainability implications. Civil society organizations monitoring environmental and social safeguards in recipient countries have had to adapt their frameworks accordingly, since Chinese state-linked financing does not always map neatly onto the conditionalities and disclosure norms built around traditional ODA architecture.
The policy implications radiating from this analysis are substantial for both Chinese domestic governance and the international climate finance regime. Domestically, the tension between top-down target-setting and market-based instruments raises the question of whether China's carbon market can mature into a credible price signal capable of driving genuine decarbonization, or whether it will remain administratively managed in ways that limit its efficiency and its attractiveness for potential linkage with other emissions trading systems, such as the EU's. Internationally, the coexistence of aggressive renewable deployment with continued coal plant approvals complicates the diplomatic narrative China presents at COP negotiations and in bilateral climate dialogues, forcing counterpart governments and multilateral institutions to calibrate expectations around China's Nationally Determined Contributions with a more nuanced understanding of its governance constraints. For scholars of ODA and development finance, the article's framework offers a useful corrective to analyses that treat China's overseas green investment purely as either benevolent South-South cooperation or predatory debt-trap diplomacy; instead, it suggests these flows are better understood as extensions of a domestic governance logic in which market mechanisms operate within, not against, an overarching framework of state-directed industrial strategy.
Looking ahead, researchers and practitioners should watch several trend lines that this article's framework helps clarify. First, the expansion and potential sectoral broadening of China's national carbon market—currently concentrated in the power sector—will be a key test of whether market instruments can gain genuine traction within a governance system still oriented around administrative targets. Second, the trajectory of China's overseas energy financing, particularly whether the post-2021 pledge to halt new overseas coal financing holds durably against energy security pressures in partner countries, will shape the composition of clean energy access across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America for years to come. Third, the interplay between China's domestic industrial overcapacity in green technology and the tariff and localization responses now emerging from the United States, the EU, and increasingly middle-income countries will determine whether the world benefits from cheaper decarbonization technology or fragments into competing regional supply chains. For institutions like IOCSS engaged in tracking civil society, governance, and development finance across Asia, this scholarship is a reminder that climate policy analysis divorced from political economy and governance structure will systematically misread both China's domestic trajectory and its expanding footprint in global development finance—and that future research agendas should continue to interrogate the market-state hybrid at the heart of China's climate strategy rather than treating it as a transitional anomaly destined to converge on liberal market templates.