[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-22
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's position as both the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and its largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles has made the internal architecture of Chinese climate governance a matter of global consequence. A new book review published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (Ahead of Print, 2026) turns scholarly attention to precisely this architecture. Geoffrey C. Chen of the Department of China Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou reviews China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market, written by Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang and published by Edward Elgar in 2025. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks how development actors and political economies intersect across Asia, a rigorously reviewed academic study of China's climate institutions offers a useful entry point into debates that extend well beyond China's borders, touching on how authoritarian and quasi-market systems manage the politics of decarbonization.
According to Chen's review, Lo and Xiang's central contribution is an examination of "the institutionalisation and structural challenges for China's climate policy over the past decade," a period that has seen China formalize carbon-related targets, expand emissions trading pilots, and consolidate climate authority within its bureaucracy. Rather than treating China's climate apparatus as a fixed or monolithic system, the book situates it "within the broader context of global environmental politics," implying that domestic institutional choices in Beijing cannot be understood in isolation from international climate diplomacy and market pressures. Chen identifies the book's key strength as conceptual: the authors deploy three influential but often loosely applied frameworks — environmental authoritarianism, the centralized developmental state, and ecological civilization — not as fixed labels imposed on Chinese cases, but as flexible analytical lenses. This distinction matters for how the book is likely to be read by comparative political economy scholars, since it signals an attempt to avoid the trap of forcing China's experience into pre-existing Western theoretical categories.
This approach resonates with a wider body of scholarship on developmental states and environmental governance across East and Southeast Asia, where questions about whether centralized, state-led economic models can also deliver effective environmental outcomes have long been debated in relation to South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam as much as China. By explicitly invoking the "centralized developmental state" as an interpretive category, Lo and Xiang's book, as characterized in Chen's review, positions China's climate transition within a regional lineage of state-directed industrial policy rather than treating it as sui generis. The reference to "ecological civilization" — a concept that has circulated in Chinese Communist Party policy discourse — further situates the book within debates over how authoritarian political systems generate their own vocabularies of environmental legitimacy, a theme relevant to IOCSS's broader interest in how civil society space and governance narratives interact in non-liberal democratic contexts.
The review's assessment carries direct implications for how policymakers, donors, and researchers interpret China's climate commitments. Chen describes the book as offering "a careful and comprehensive engagement with both theory and empirical cases in China's climate governance," and credits it with "a balanced and analytically grounded assessment" that critically examines the efficacy of specific policy mechanisms and institutional arrangements rather than simply cataloguing them. Notably, the review highlights the book's attention to the "fragmented nature of climate governance under authoritarian systems" — a finding with significance beyond China specialists. For researchers and practitioners engaged in climate finance, international cooperation, or ODA programming involving China-adjacent supply chains and markets, the suggestion that Chinese climate governance is institutionally fragmented, rather than uniformly centralized, complicates simplistic narratives about top-down authoritarian efficiency in environmental policy delivery.
For scholars of political economy and civil society studies, the value of Lo and Xiang's book, as conveyed through Chen's review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, lies in its refusal to resolve China's climate governance into a single explanatory frame. Its treatment of environmental authoritarianism alongside market mechanisms and developmental-state logics suggests that future research should continue probing where genuine institutional innovation occurs versus where governance remains fragmented or symbolic. Practitioners engaged with Asian climate and development policy would do well to track how the analytical categories foregrounded in this book — environmental authoritarianism, the centralized developmental state, and ecological civilization — get taken up, contested, or refined in subsequent scholarship, since these concepts increasingly frame how the region's largest economy is understood as both a climate risk and a climate solution provider. As China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market enters wider academic circulation following Edward Elgar's 2025 publication, its reception in venues such as the Journal of Contemporary Asia will itself be a useful indicator of how comparative Asian political economy scholarship is evolving to address the governance dimensions of the global energy transition.