[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-26
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's path toward carbon neutrality by 2060 remains one of the most consequential variables in global climate politics, and the governance mechanisms Beijing uses to manage that transition are increasingly scrutinized by scholars of development and political economy across Asia. It is in this context that Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang's book, China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in Cheltenham in 2025, arrives as a timely contribution. The 212-page volume was reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Asia by Geoffrey C. Chen of the Department of China Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, with the review appearing online in March 2026 under the DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks how state institutions, markets, and civil society interact across development contexts, a book that interrogates the machinery behind China's climate commitments offers a valuable entry point into debates that extend well beyond China's borders, touching on how authoritarian and developmental states more broadly manage ecological transition.
The substantive core of Lo and Xiang's book, as characterized in the review, is what Chen describes as "a critical examination of that institutionalisation and the structural challenges for China's climate policy over the past decade." Rather than treating China's climate apparatus as a monolithic top-down system, the authors reportedly deploy three analytical lenses in combination: environmental authoritarianism, the centralized developmental state, and the notion of ecological civilization, a concept that has become central to Chinese Communist Party discourse on environmental governance. According to the review, the authors use these frameworks flexibly to interpret specific cases rather than imposing rigid definitions, allowing the book to surface what Chen calls "the fragmented and domain-specific character of climate governance under authoritarian rule." This is a notable finding for political economy scholars, since it complicates a common assumption that centralized authoritarian systems produce uniformly coherent policy outcomes; instead, the book documents unevenness across sectors and levels of government even within a single national climate strategy.
That fragmentation has clear resonance with broader regional patterns in how Asian states and civil society actors negotiate the politics of decarbonization. Chen Xiang's institutional home at the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University situates the analysis within a domestic Chinese policy research tradition that is closely engaged with the practicalities of implementation, while Alex Y. Lo's background spans environmental governance research at institutions including the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Centre for Civil Society and Governance at the University of Hong Kong, giving the collaboration a vantage point that bridges mainland policy analysis with Hong Kong-based scholarship on civil society and governance. This pairing matters for comparative purposes: across much of Asia, from Indonesia's just energy transition partnership negotiations to India's state-level renewable energy targets, climate governance is similarly characterized by an interplay between centralized state direction and market instruments, even where the political system differs sharply from China's. The book's attention to the intersection of state, market, and society, as the publisher's description frames it, gives researchers a comparative vocabulary for examining how developmental states elsewhere in the region balance industrial policy with emissions reduction commitments.
For policy audiences and researchers tracking official development assistance and climate finance flows into and from Asia, the book's focus on market-based and industry-focused policy interventions carries direct relevance. China's own domestic decarbonization measures, including the instruments the book examines, increasingly shape the country's posture as a provider rather than solely a recipient of climate-related finance and technology, a shift that has downstream effects on how multilateral institutions and bilateral donors calibrate their own climate ODA strategies in the region. The review's emphasis on the book's "careful and comprehensive engagement with both theory and empirical cases" suggests it will be useful not only to China specialists but to comparative governance scholars assessing how centralized developmental states more generally translate global climate targets into domestic administrative practice. That the review appears in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, a journal with a long record of publishing critical political economy scholarship on the region, underscores that the book is being read as a contribution to debates about state capacity and authoritarian governance as much as to climate policy narrowly defined.
Looking ahead, the appearance of this review as an ahead-of-print item in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in early 2026 signals that scholarly engagement with China's institutionalized climate governance is still actively developing, and researchers should watch for how the book's environmental authoritarianism and ecological civilization frameworks are taken up, contested, or refined in subsequent literature. Practitioners working on climate finance, ODA programming, or civil society engagement in Asia would do well to treat the book's central finding, that China's climate governance is fragmented and domain-specific rather than seamlessly centralized, as a caution against overly simplified models of authoritarian environmental policymaking when designing partnerships or comparative assessments. As China's decarbonization trajectory continues to influence regional energy markets and diplomatic positioning ahead of future international climate negotiations, works like Lo and Xiang's that combine empirical case analysis with conceptual rigor will remain essential reference points for anyone trying to understand how the world's largest emitter is actually managing, rather than merely announcing, its climate transition.