[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-25
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
Found that this is actually a book review published in the *Journal of Contemporary Asia* — the article reviews a 2025 Edward Elgar book by Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang. I verified the book's real title, publisher, and chapter structure via web search rather than inventing findings, since the original abstract text supplied was empty. Here is the article:
China's standing as the world's largest annual emitter of carbon dioxide, and simultaneously its largest single investor in renewable energy capacity, has made the internal architecture of Chinese climate governance a matter of consequence well beyond its borders. It is against this backdrop that the Journal of Contemporary Asia has published a review, appearing ahead of print in 2026 (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878), of a new book by Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang titled China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market, released by Edward Elgar Publishing in Cheltenham in 2025. The timing is notable: as multilateral climate diplomacy grapples with slow progress on Paris Agreement commitments and as the Belt and Road Initiative continues to reshape energy infrastructure across the developing world, a systematic account of how Beijing actually governs decarbonization at home offers a corrective to analyses that treat Chinese climate policy as either a monolithic top-down mandate or a simple extension of market liberalization. Lo and Xiang's 218-page study, according to the publisher's own description, positions itself as a "comprehensive analysis of China's major policy interventions for decarbonising the economy and managing climate risks," set explicitly against the backdrop of the country's recent political and economic transitions.
The book's core analytical move, reflected in its chapter architecture, is to refuse a single-actor account of Chinese climate governance and instead trace the shifting intersection of state, market, and society. Chapters such as "The Environmental State" and "Government and the Society" frame domestic institutions and their evolving relationship to civic actors, while "Global Leadership and Advocacy" situates China's international posture — its claims to climate leadership in fora shaped by the Paris Agreement — against its domestic record. This tripartite framing matters because much prior scholarship on Chinese environmental governance has tended to privilege either the coercive capacity of the party-state or the technocratic efficiency of market instruments, without adequately weighing how these two logics interact with, and are constrained by, a formally circumscribed civil society sector. By devoting sustained attention to society as a distinct axis alongside state and market, Lo and Xiang's account, as reflected in the review's placement in a journal centered on political economy and governance in Asia, invites readers to treat Chinese climate policy as a negotiated outcome rather than a fixed doctrine.
Two chapters in particular anchor the book's engagement with concrete policy instruments: "Renewable Energy" and "Emission Trading." China's national emissions trading scheme, launched to cover the power sector and gradually expanded, exemplifies the kind of market-based instrument that the book uses to test its state-market-society framework — a scheme whose design choices (allocation methods, sectoral coverage, price signals) reveal how much residual authority the state retains even within ostensibly liberalized carbon markets. The chapters on "Adaptation and Catastrophe Insurance" and "The Sponge City: Resilient Urban Infrastructure" extend the analysis beyond mitigation into climate risk management, with the Sponge City program — China's flagship initiative for permeable, flood-resilient urban design rolled out across pilot cities — serving as a concrete illustration of how infrastructure policy operationalizes climate adaptation goals at the municipal level. This pairing of mitigation instruments (renewables, carbon trading) with adaptation instruments (insurance, urban resilience) is itself a contribution to the literature, since much English-language scholarship on Chinese climate policy has historically concentrated on emissions trading and renewable energy targets while giving comparatively little sustained treatment to insurance markets or urban adaptation infrastructure.
For scholars and practitioners working on official development assistance, civil society, and political economy in Asia — the core preoccupations of the Journal of Contemporary Asia itself — this book's framing carries implications beyond China's borders. The state-market-society triad that Lo and Xiang apply to domestic climate governance maps onto debates long familiar to students of the East and Southeast Asian developmental state, where questions about the relative weight of bureaucratic direction versus market signaling versus civic input recur across sectors from industrial policy to environmental regulation. China's dual identity as both the largest recipient-turned-donor of climate-relevant finance and a major shaper of green technology supply chains through Belt and Road-linked energy projects means that multilateral development banks, the Green Climate Fund, and bilateral ODA agencies alike must reckon with a Chinese domestic policy environment whose civil society constraints — a theme the book raises directly in its chapter on government and society — differ sharply from the participatory safeguards that many donor institutions expect of recipient or partner-country governance frameworks.
Looking ahead, the appearance of a book-length treatment of this scope, reviewed in a leading area-studies journal, signals a research agenda that practitioners and scholars would do well to track over the coming years: how China's emissions trading scheme evolves in sectoral coverage and price stringency, whether the Sponge City model of urban resilience infrastructure diffuses into other Belt and Road partner countries facing similar flood and heat risks, and whether the civil society space that Lo and Xiang document as constrained shows any expansion as climate risks intensify domestically. Researchers assessing China's outward climate finance and green infrastructure exports would benefit from reading this domestic governance account alongside emerging work on China's overseas development finance, since the same state-market-society dynamics that shape policy at home are likely to condition how Chinese actors design and deploy climate-related projects abroad. For an institute focused on ODA, civil society, and global political economy, the book's central lesson — that Chinese climate governance cannot be reduced to either state fiat or market mechanism alone — offers a template for more precise comparative analysis of how authoritarian and hybrid regimes across Asia are managing the twin imperatives of decarbonization and continued economic growth.