[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-17
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's response to climate change has moved from a peripheral concern to a central pillar of its domestic governance and international positioning, and this shift arrives at a moment when the global climate order itself is under strain. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China occupies a paradoxical position: it is both the chief obstacle to rapid decarbonization and the chief supplier of the technologies that make decarbonization possible elsewhere. Against this backdrop, the article "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses a question of considerable urgency for scholars of comparative political economy and international development alike: how does an authoritarian, party-state-led system reconcile the imperatives of economic growth, energy security, and industrial competitiveness with the increasingly binding constraints of a global carbon budget? The timing of this inquiry is significant, coming as multilateral climate finance mechanisms falter, as Western governments reconsider their own industrial and trade policies toward Chinese green technology, and as many developing countries look to Beijing rather than to traditional OECD donors for infrastructure and energy investment.
The article's framing around transition, governance, and market signals an analytical approach that resists treating Chinese climate policy as either a simple top-down mandate or a purely market-driven response to price signals. Instead, the implicit argument is that China's decarbonization pathway is best understood as an evolving hybrid in which state planning instruments—five-year plans, dual carbon goals (peak emissions before 2030, carbon neutrality by 2060), administrative targets cascaded down to provincial and municipal officials—interact with market mechanisms such as the national emissions trading scheme, green bond markets, and subsidized industrial policy for renewables and batteries. This is consistent with a broader scholarly consensus that China's environmental governance operates through what has been termed "campaign-style" enforcement layered atop more routinized bureaucratic incentive structures, where local officials are evaluated not only on GDP growth but increasingly on emissions intensity and pollution metrics. The governance dimension is particularly important because it exposes the tensions within the Chinese system: coal-dependent provinces and state-owned enterprises resist rapid transition even as central directives push toward renewables, producing uneven implementation, local resistance, and periodic energy shortages when administrative targets collide with grid realities, as seen in the power crunches of recent years. The market dimension, meanwhile, captures how China has effectively industrialized green technology production to the point of global dominance, turning climate compliance into an instrument of economic statecraft rather than merely an environmental obligation.
These dynamics resonate strongly with broader regional and global trends that IOCSS tracks across development and political economy research. In Southeast Asia, South Asia, and parts of Africa, Chinese state banks and enterprises are simultaneously the largest financiers of coal-fired power plants built in the 2010s and, increasingly, the dominant suppliers of solar and wind infrastructure under a rebranded "green Belt and Road" framework announced after 2021. This creates a bifurcated legacy: recipient countries inherit both the environmental liabilities of earlier fossil investments and the opportunities of cheap renewable technology transfer, often without the governance safeguards, environmental impact assessments, or civil society consultation mechanisms that Western and multilateral donors have, however imperfectly, institutionalized. For civil society organizations operating in recipient countries, this raises distinct advocacy challenges, since Chinese development finance typically bypasses the conditionality and participatory frameworks that give local NGOs leverage over project design under World Bank or bilateral OECD-DAC arrangements. The article's attention to Chinese domestic governance thus has direct external relevance: the same administrative logic that determines how emissions targets are enforced in Shandong or Inner Mongolia shapes the terms on which Chinese capital and technology are exported to Jakarta, Lagos, or Nairobi.
The policy implications of this research extend well beyond China's borders. For governments negotiating climate finance and technology transfer, understanding that Chinese climate policy is driven as much by industrial competitiveness and energy security calculations as by international diplomatic commitments should temper expectations about the pace and sequencing of China's own transition, while also clarifying why China has become so effective at exporting decarbonization hardware even as its domestic coal capacity continues to expand. For scholars and practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the research underscores the need to develop monitoring and accountability frameworks tailored to state-led, market-hybrid development financing rather than assuming that instruments designed for traditional bilateral or multilateral aid will translate. It also has implications for the ongoing debate over "just transition" frameworks: if China's domestic transition is managed through administrative campaigns that impose real social costs on coal-dependent regions and workers, similar distributive tensions are likely to recur wherever Chinese-financed energy transitions unfold abroad, making labor and community impact assessment an urgent, underdeveloped area of research and advocacy.
Looking ahead, researchers and practitioners should watch several intersecting developments: the recalibration of China's carbon market as it expands beyond the power sector into steel, cement, and aluminum; the extent to which provincial resistance to central emissions targets intensifies or subsides as local fiscal pressures mount; and how international scrutiny of Chinese green technology exports—amid tariff disputes and supply chain "de-risking" in the United States and European Union—reshapes the economics of the very market mechanisms the article analyzes. For the civil society and development research community, the more pressing task is to build empirical, field-level understanding of how Chinese climate and energy investments are actually experienced by communities and workers in recipient countries, since the governance logics documented at the domestic level in China are likely to travel, in modified form, wherever its capital and technology go. In this sense, the article's contribution is not simply an analysis of one country's climate policy but a template for understanding how authoritarian developmental states more broadly are learning to govern the transition to a low-carbon economy without fully surrendering the growth-oriented, state-capitalist logics that have defined their development models for decades.