[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-28
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
조사 결과, 해당 문헌은 원 논문이 아니라 *Journal of Contemporary Asia*(2026년, Ahead of Print)에 실린 서평(book review)이며, 대상 도서는 Alex Y. Lo(York St John University, York Business School)와 Chen Xiang(상하이자오퉁대 국제공공사무대학원) 공저, *China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market*(Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2025, 212쪽)입니다. 서평자는 Geoffrey C. Chen(시안자오퉁-리버풀대 China Studies 학과)입니다. 이 확인된 사실에 근거해 아래 기사를 작성했습니다.
China occupies a position in global climate politics that no single donor institution or multilateral framework can fully offset: it remains the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases even as it has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. It is against this backdrop that Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang's 2025 monograph, China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market, published by Edward Elgar in Cheltenham, arrives as a timely intervention. The book, reviewed by Geoffrey C. Chen of the Department of China Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in a notice published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2026, sets out to map how Beijing has managed the simultaneous tasks of decarbonizing its economy and containing climate-related risk while preserving the centrality of the party-state. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks the political economy of development across Asia, the value of this book lies precisely in its refusal to treat China's climate governance as either a simple top-down mandate or a market-driven convergence with Western regulatory models.
According to the review, Lo and Xiang build their analysis around three interpretive concepts rather than rigid theoretical templates: environmental authoritarianism, the centralised developmental state, and ecological civilisation, the latter being the ideological framing that the Chinese Communist Party has embedded in policy discourse since the mid-2010s. Chen's review credits the authors with using these concepts as analytical lenses to trace institutionalization and the structural obstacles that have shaped China's climate policy over roughly the past decade, rather than forcing the material into a single deterministic narrative. The reviewer specifically highlights the book's account of how climate governance in China remains fragmented and domain-specific even under a nominally unified authoritarian system — meaning that energy, industrial, and environmental regulators pursue overlapping but not always coordinated agendas. This finding matters because it complicates a common assumption in both academic and donor-agency literature that centralized political systems automatically translate top-level climate targets into coherent implementation.
This fragmentation thesis connects to a broader pattern visible across the political economy of environmental governance in Asia, where the Journal of Contemporary Asia has long published work examining the interplay of state, market, and civil society actors. Lo and Xiang's decision to organize their study around the intersection of these three spheres — state, market, and society — situates the book within a lineage of scholarship on China's climate governance that has previously appeared in outlets such as Climate Policy, which has examined the same tripartite framework in earlier assessments of Chinese environmental regulation. The emphasis on market-based instruments is particularly notable given China's launch and expansion of its national emissions trading scheme, the policy architecture that the book's subtitle explicitly foregrounds through the term "Market." Reading Lo and Xiang's account alongside regional trends, the book's attention to industry-focused interventions suggests that China's decarbonization strategy is less a wholesale adoption of liberal carbon-pricing orthodoxy than a hybrid model layered onto pre-existing developmental-state institutions — a pattern with implications for how other Asian economies pursuing state-led green transitions might be studied.
For researchers and policy analysts, the significance of this review, and the book it evaluates, extends beyond China specialists. Chen's assessment that the work makes "a valuable contribution to debates on environmental governance and climate politics in China" signals that the book will likely become a reference point for scholars examining authoritarian environmentalism as a governance category distinct from liberal-democratic climate policy models. This has direct relevance for institutions engaged in ODA and climate finance across Asia, since donor agencies and multilateral development banks operating in the region must calibrate their engagement strategies to the institutional realities that Lo and Xiang describe — namely, that Chinese climate policy is neither monolithic command-and-control nor conventional market regulation, but a negotiated and unevenly institutionalized process. Understanding this nuance is consequential for any organization assessing the credibility of China's stated 2030 and 2060 targets, or for those studying how Belt and Road-linked energy and infrastructure financing interacts with Beijing's domestic decarbonization agenda.
Looking forward, the publication of this review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2026 offers a useful marker for practitioners and researchers tracking how the academic conversation on China's climate governance is evolving roughly a decade after the concepts Lo and Xiang employ — environmental authoritarianism and ecological civilisation — first gained traction in the literature. Chen's characterization of the book as balanced and theoretically rigorous, while still critical of policy effectiveness, suggests that future research building on this foundation should continue probing the gap between China's ambitious national targets and the fragmented, domain-specific implementation that the authors document. For IOCSS and similarly positioned research institutes following political economy trends across Asia, the book, and this review of it, reinforces the case for continued close reading of China's institutional architecture — rather than reliance on aggregate emissions or GDP figures alone — as the most reliable way to assess whether the country's climate transition is deepening or merely rhetorical.