[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-18
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's decarbonization trajectory has become one of the defining variables in global climate diplomacy, and any serious effort to understand it must move past the shorthand of "state-led green transition" that dominates much commentary. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's 2026 review of Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang's China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market (Edward Elgar, 2025), authored by Geoffrey C. Chen of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, arrives at a moment when China simultaneously leads the world in renewable energy deployment, remains the largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, and is navigating a slowing economy, a stressed property sector, and mounting geopolitical friction over clean-technology trade. For an institute tracking the political economy of development and governance, the value of this book — and of its careful reception in a leading Asia-focused journal — lies in its refusal to treat Chinese climate policy as either a monolithic top-down mandate or a simple case of market liberalization. Instead, Lo and Xiang, writing from York Business School and Shanghai Jiao Tong University respectively, frame China's climate governance as an evolving negotiation among state authority, market instruments, and societal actors, unfolding against a backdrop of political and economic transition that is at least as consequential as the climate targets themselves.
The book's core contribution, as reflected in its structure and in how it has been received, is to disaggregate China's climate policy architecture into interacting institutional layers rather than presenting it as a single coherent strategy handed down from Beijing. It traces the framework of environmental and climate governance that has developed since the early 2010s — carbon-intensity targets, the national emissions trading scheme, renewable energy subsidies and mandates, and industrial policy aimed at dominance in solar, wind, battery, and electric-vehicle supply chains — and situates these instruments within the shifting relationship between central planning authority and market mechanisms. This matters analytically because much Western commentary on China's climate policy oscillates between two caricatures: an omnipotent authoritarian state capable of engineering outcomes at will, or a market economy simply catching up to global decarbonization pressures. Lo and Xiang's account, and the review's emphasis on the intersection of state, market, and society, pushes toward a more textured reading in which market-based instruments are themselves political creations, subject to bureaucratic bargaining, local government incentives, and the state's continuing willingness to intervene when market outcomes diverge from strategic goals — whether those goals are emissions reduction, industrial competitiveness, or energy security.
This framing resonates strongly with a broader literature on Chinese environmental governance that has moved, over roughly the past decade, from state-centric models toward multi-actor accounts incorporating market dynamics and civil society participation — a trajectory visible in related work such as reviews of China's climate governance as a triad of state, market, and civil society, and analyses of the country's climate policy evolution from 2009 to 2019 that stress the interplay of motivations, instruments, actors, and geopolitics. What distinguishes the newer scholarship represented by this volume is its attention to the current conjuncture: a period of slower Chinese economic growth, real-estate sector deleveraging, local government fiscal stress, and an increasingly adversarial international trade environment around green technology exports. These conditions complicate the once-tidy narrative of a state simply directing resources toward decarbonization, since local governments facing fiscal shortfalls have incentives to prioritize short-term revenue over emissions targets, and industrial policy aimed at exporting clean-tech capacity now collides with tariff and subsidy disputes with the United States, the European Union, and other trading partners. Understanding Chinese climate governance today therefore requires the kind of institutional and political-economic granularity this book supplies, rather than treating "China's green transition" as an undifferentiated bloc.
For researchers and practitioners working on official development assistance, civil society, and regional political economy — the core concerns of this institute — the book's framing carries direct implications. Much international climate finance and technical cooperation architecture, from multilateral development banks to bilateral donor programs, still implicitly models developing-country climate governance on either a strong-state or a market-liberal template. China's experience, as reconstructed here, suggests a third pathway: state-market hybridity in which formal market instruments are deployed as governance technologies within a still-dominant party-state system, and in which societal actors — environmental NGOs, research institutes, provincial regulators — occupy narrower but not negligible space for influence. This has relevance well beyond China. Southeast and South Asian economies pursuing their own energy transitions, often with Chinese investment, technology, or industrial policy as a reference point, are experimenting with similar hybrids of state direction and market mechanism, and the analytical vocabulary developed for the Chinese case — attentive to the friction between central mandates and local implementation, between climate targets and fiscal constraint — offers a transferable lens for evaluating governance quality and policy credibility elsewhere in the region.
The scholarly significance of this book, and of its appearance in the Journal of Contemporary Asia specifically, is that it resists both apologetic and alarmist framings of Chinese climate policy in favor of institutional specificity, at a time when the international discourse on China's role in the climate transition has become increasingly polarized between narratives of green leadership and narratives of strategic threat. For policy audiences, the message is that engaging with China's climate governance — whether on carbon market linkage, clean-technology trade rules, or multilateral climate finance — requires understanding the domestic bargaining among state, market, and societal actors that shapes implementation, not merely the headline targets Beijing announces. For researchers, the volume signals a maturing field that is moving past binary state-versus-market debates toward institutional and political-economy analysis attentive to transition dynamics, uneven local capacity, and the interaction between domestic governance and international pressure. As China's climate trajectory continues to shape global emissions pathways, trade politics, and the technological options available to developing economies pursuing their own transitions, this kind of granular, governance-focused scholarship will remain essential reading for anyone assessing whether — and how — the world's largest emitter can reconcile decarbonization with economic stability and political control.