Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-15
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's position as the world's largest emitter and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles makes its domestic climate governance a matter of consequence far beyond its borders. As the Paris Agreement's ratchet mechanism pushes toward tighter Nationally Determined Contributions and as Western industrial policy increasingly frames the energy transition through the lens of strategic competition with Beijing, understanding how China actually governs decarbonization at home has become indispensable to any serious account of global climate politics. It is this urgency that gives weight to Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang's monograph China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market (Edward Elgar, 2025), assessed in a recent Journal of Contemporary Asia review by Geoffrey C. Chen of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Rather than treating China's climate record as either a triumph of state capacity or a cautionary tale of authoritarian greenwashing, the book positions itself as a sustained empirical inquiry into how the Chinese state, market actors, and society interact across a decade of institutional change.
The analytical core of Lo and Xiang's contribution, as the review makes clear, lies in its refusal to treat familiar conceptual shorthand as settled fact. Terms like "environmental authoritarianism," the "centralised developmental state," and "ecological civilisation" have circulated widely in both academic and policy discourse as ready-made explanations for China's climate trajectory, often implying a coherent, top-down machine translating Beijing's will into environmental outcomes. Lo and Xiang instead deploy these concepts as analytical lenses to be tested against evidence rather than labels to be assumed. This move matters because it opens space to document the friction, improvisation, and unevenness that actually characterize implementation — a friction visible across the book's empirical chapters, which move from the architecture of the environmental state and its relationship with society, through China's global climate leadership and advocacy, into sector-specific case studies of renewable energy deployment, the national emissions trading scheme, catastrophe insurance and adaptation policy, and the "sponge city" program for resilient urban infrastructure. The breadth of this case selection allows the authors to show that governance capacity is not uniform: China's ability to mobilize resources for renewable energy expansion, for instance, rests on very different institutional foundations than its more halting progress on carbon pricing or urban climate adaptation.
This disaggregated picture resonates with a broader pattern visible across Asian political economy scholarship, where the notion of a monolithic developmental state has steadily given way to more textured accounts of fragmented authoritarianism, central-local bargaining, and the selective incorporation of market mechanisms into ostensibly state-led projects. China's climate governance, on this reading, is less a singular top-down mandate than a layered system in which central targets — the 2030 peaking and 2060 neutrality commitments chief among them — are refracted through provincial cadre evaluation systems, state-owned enterprise incentives, and an emerging but still immature carbon market. This mirrors dynamics familiar from other domains of Chinese governance, from anti-poverty campaigns to pollution control inspections, where centrally announced goals generate compliance pressure that is met locally through a mixture of genuine investment, statistical massaging, and selective enforcement. Placing China's climate transition within this comparative frame — rather than treating it as sui generis — allows scholars of civil society and ODA-adjacent political economy to draw lessons that travel: the tension between centralized target-setting and decentralized implementation is hardly unique to China, and appears in comparable form across large developing and middle-income states attempting to reconcile growth imperatives with environmental commitments.
For researchers and practitioners engaged with development cooperation and civil society studies, the book's account of the "government and society" relationship carries particular significance. Much of the international discourse on China's environmental governance has focused on state capacity and market instruments while paying comparatively little attention to the constrained but not wholly absent role of civil society actors, environmental NGOs, and public participation mechanisms in shaping implementation on the ground. If Lo and Xiang's treatment substantiates the claim — as the review's emphasis on institutionalization and "structural challenges" suggests — that China's climate governance model has real limits precisely where it depends on channels other than direct state command, this has implications for how the international community calibrates its expectations of Chinese climate diplomacy and South-South cooperation on green technology transfer. Donor governments, multilateral development banks, and civil society organizations engaging China as a partner, competitor, or model for other developing countries need a more granular understanding of where its governance model travels well and where it does not, rather than relying on stylized narratives of either authoritarian efficiency or authoritarian fragility.
Looking ahead, the value of this kind of institutionally grounded, sector-disaggregated analysis will only grow as China's climate policy enters a more contested phase domestically, marked by slowing economic growth, real-estate-sector drag, and rising skepticism about the fiscal sustainability of further renewable subsidies, even as the country doubles down on exporting green technology as an engine of growth. Researchers should watch closely whether the emissions trading scheme matures into a genuine price-discovery mechanism or remains a largely symbolic instrument overshadowed by administrative targets, and whether adaptation-focused programs like sponge cities can scale beyond demonstration projects into systemic urban resilience infrastructure. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the more immediate task is to move past treating "China's model" as a single exportable package and instead disaggregate which specific governance tools — planning integration, cadre accountability, market instruments, or civil society engagement — are actually portable to other developing-country contexts, and under what political conditions. Lo and Xiang's book, and the critical scholarly conversation it is generating, offers a useful corrective against both uncritical admiration and reflexive dismissal of China's climate governance experiment, insisting instead on the harder work of empirical specificity.