Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-14
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's positioning as both the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and its largest manufacturer of renewable energy technology has made its domestic climate policy one of the most consequential and closely scrutinized subjects in contemporary global political economy. As the international community grapples with the widening gap between the Paris Agreement's temperature targets and actual emissions trajectories, Beijing's approach to decarbonization carries outsized weight—not only because of the scale of China's own emissions, but because its choices about how to govern the transition, structure carbon markets, and balance state control with market mechanisms increasingly shape the options available to other developing economies. A recent contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia examining China's climate policy through the lenses of transition, governance, and market offers a timely opportunity to interrogate how the Chinese party-state has sought to reconcile continued economic growth, energy security, and industrial policy ambitions with its stated commitment to carbon neutrality by 2060.
At the heart of this inquiry lies a tension that has long animated scholarship on Chinese political economy: the coexistence of centralized authoritarian governance with fragmented, often contradictory implementation at the subnational level. China's climate governance architecture is frequently described as a hybrid of top-down target-setting—embodied in five-year plans, dual carbon goals, and cadre evaluation systems that now formally incorporate environmental metrics—and bottom-up bargaining among provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, and increasingly powerful clean-energy industrial lobbies. This dynamic produces what scholars have termed "fragmented authoritarianism" in the climate domain, where Beijing's ambitious pronouncements on peak carbon and neutrality timelines must pass through a gauntlet of local implementation that is shaped by regional development disparities, entrenched coal interests in provinces like Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, and the persistent political weight of employment and GDP growth targets. Understanding how these governance tensions are mediated—through pilot carbon trading schemes, administrative mandates, and financial regulation—offers insight into why China's transition has proceeded unevenly, with rapid gains in renewable deployment occurring alongside continued approvals of new coal-fired capacity, particularly in the aftermath of energy security anxieties triggered by the 2021-2022 power shortages and the broader geopolitical volatility following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The market dimension of China's climate policy is equally significant, and arguably represents the most consequential story for the global political economy of energy over the past decade. China's national carbon emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021, remains the largest in the world by covered emissions, yet it has been criticized for its narrow initial sectoral coverage, intensity-based rather than absolute caps, and relatively low carbon prices compared to the European Union's system. At the same time, China's state-directed industrial policy has propelled it to overwhelming dominance in solar photovoltaic manufacturing, battery production, and electric vehicle exports—an outcome that reflects not free-market competition but a deliberate fusion of subsidies, state financing through policy banks, local government co-investment, and protected domestic demand. This model of market-making through state guidance complicates conventional Western frameworks that treat markets and states as opposing forces; instead, China's experience suggests a form of "state capitalism for climate" in which market mechanisms are deployed selectively and instrumentally within a broader architecture of political control. This has profound implications for how other developing countries, many of which lack China's fiscal capacity and industrial base, might attempt to replicate or adapt elements of this model.
These dynamics resonate far beyond China's borders and intersect directly with ongoing debates in development studies and international political economy about the future of ODA, South-South cooperation, and the global governance of the energy transition. As traditional donor countries in the OECD grapple with fiscal constraints and, in some cases, retrenchment from climate finance commitments, China's Belt and Road Initiative and its associated energy infrastructure financing have become an alternative—if contested—channel through which developing countries access capital for both renewable and, historically, coal-fired power projects. Beijing's 2021 pledge to cease financing overseas coal projects marked a significant shift, redirecting outbound investment toward solar, wind, and grid infrastructure, and reshaping the terms on which recipient countries negotiate energy partnerships. For civil society organizations and governance watchdogs operating in recipient states, this raises pressing questions about transparency, debt sustainability, environmental safeguards, and the degree to which China's own domestic governance model—characterized by limited independent oversight and constrained civil society space—is exported alongside its capital and technology. The interplay between China's domestic climate governance and its external development financing thus represents a critical node connecting political economy scholarship, ODA effectiveness research, and civil society advocacy.
Looking forward, the policy and research implications of this scholarship are substantial. For researchers, China's experience offers a rich empirical terrain for testing theories of authoritarian environmentalism, developmental statism, and the political economy of industrial policy, particularly as debates intensify over whether state-led approaches can outperform market-liberal ones in achieving rapid decarbonization at scale. For practitioners in development and climate finance, the central challenge is calibrating engagement with China's dual role as both a systemic emitter requiring deeper decarbonization commitments and an indispensable supplier of the clean technologies the rest of the world needs to meet its own climate targets. As trade tensions over Chinese solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles escalate in the United States, European Union, and elsewhere, the question of how to govern this interdependence—balancing industrial protectionism against the urgency of affordable decarbonization—will remain one of the defining political economy challenges of the coming decade. Scholarship that rigorously unpacks the governance mechanisms, market structures, and political incentives underlying China's climate transition, such as the analysis offered in this article, provides essential groundwork for policymakers and civil society actors seeking to navigate this complex and rapidly evolving terrain.