[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-16
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's climate policy has moved from the periphery of its economic agenda to its very center, a shift with consequences that ripple far beyond its own borders. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and, simultaneously, the dominant manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles, China occupies a paradoxical position in the global climate order: it is both the problem and, potentially, a substantial part of the solution. The recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," arrives at a moment when the international community is grappling with the slow pace of the Paris Agreement's implementation, the fragmentation of climate diplomacy amid great-power rivalry, and mounting anxiety in the Global South over how the energy transition will be financed and governed. For an institute focused on development, ODA, and civil society, understanding the internal logic of China's climate governance is essential, because Beijing's choices increasingly shape the terms on which developing countries access clean-energy technology, climate finance, and infrastructure investment.
The article's central contribution lies in disentangling the three forces named in its title—transition, governance, and market—and showing how they interact in ways that defy simple narratives of either top-down state planning or market-driven innovation. China's climate policy is neither a pure command-economy exercise nor a laissez-faire embrace of green capitalism; it is a hybrid system in which the central state sets binding targets (carbon peaking by 2030, carbon neutrality by 2060), while provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, and an increasingly sophisticated private sector compete and cooperate to meet them. This governance architecture produces uneven outcomes: some provinces race ahead in renewable deployment to capture industrial advantage, while others, dependent on coal for fiscal revenue and employment, resist decarbonization or delay compliance. The article's analysis of this intra-national unevenness is significant because it corrects a persistent tendency in Western commentary to treat "China" as a monolithic actor in climate negotiations, when in fact its climate policy is the outcome of continuous bargaining between central mandates and local political economies—a dynamic familiar to scholars of decentralized authoritarianism but still underappreciated in climate governance literature.
Equally important is the article's treatment of market mechanisms, particularly the national carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) launched in 2021 and gradually expanded across sectors. The piece situates the ETS within a broader pattern of what might be called "state-guided marketization," where price signals are permitted to operate but always within boundaries set by industrial policy priorities—energy security, technological self-sufficiency, and employment stability chief among them. This is a distinctly different model from the EU's more purely market-based approach to carbon pricing, and it raises important comparative questions for scholars of political economy: can a hybrid model deliver deeper decarbonization at lower social cost, or does the persistence of state intervention simply mask inefficiencies and delay harder structural reforms, such as the phase-out of coal-fired power that still supplies roughly half of China's electricity? The article's nuanced answer—that the model has proven remarkably effective at scaling clean-energy manufacturing but far less effective at directly curbing domestic emissions growth—captures a tension that will likely define China's climate trajectory for the remainder of this decade.
This tension connects directly to broader regional and global trends that IOCSS tracks closely. China's dominance in clean-energy manufacturing has made it the indispensable supplier for the energy transitions of countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which lack the industrial base to produce solar panels or batteries domestically. Chinese state banks, alongside firms like Envision, LONGi, and CATL, have become de facto climate financiers and technology providers for the Global South, often filling gaps left by the retrenchment of traditional Western ODA and multilateral climate funds. This reconfigures the geography of climate governance: rather than a北-to-南 flow of concessional aid governed by OECD-DAC norms, we increasingly see a China-centered flow of commercial finance, equipment exports, and infrastructure partnerships under the Belt and Road Initiative's "green" rebranding. For civil society organizations monitoring transparency, labor standards, and environmental safeguards in recipient countries, this shift poses new challenges, since Chinese development finance operates under different disclosure norms and accountability mechanisms than those built around Western donors and institutions like the World Bank.
The policy implications of this research are substantial for both Chinese domestic reformers and the international community. Domestically, the article's findings suggest that further decarbonization will require Beijing to resolve the governance tension between central targets and provincial fiscal dependence on carbon-intensive industries—likely through fiscal transfers, just-transition programs for coal-dependent regions, and a broader carbon price that finally reaches the power sector's marginal emitters. Internationally, the findings imply that climate diplomacy focused solely on inter-state pledges (NDCs, COP negotiations) understates the importance of China's domestic market architecture in determining actual emissions outcomes, and that development actors seeking to influence global decarbonization pathways must engage more directly with Chinese provincial governments, state-owned enterprise governance, and ETS design—not only with Beijing's central ministries. This is a call for more granulated, multi-level engagement rather than treating China as a unitary negotiating partner.
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners should watch several indicators that this article helps frame: whether China's ETS expands to cover steel, cement, and aluminum as promised, whether provincial coal dependency erodes fast enough to meet the 2030 peaking target, and whether Chinese overseas green finance begins to incorporate more robust environmental and social safeguards in response to recipient-country civil society pressure. For IOCSS's mission of tracking ODA and civil society dynamics in the context of global political economy, the key insight from this scholarship is that China's climate transition is not simply an environmental story but a governance experiment with direct consequences for how development finance, technology transfer, and civil society oversight will be structured across Asia and the wider Global South in the coming decade. Those consequences will be felt unevenly, and monitoring them will require sustained, multi-level attention rather than reliance on headline national pledges alone.