[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-29
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
선행 확인: 요청하신 "작성" 지시에 맞는 스킬을 먼저 검토했습니다. IOCSS 학술 분석 기사 작성은 ODA 제안서/보고서, 발표자료, 회의 보고서, 통화 기록 인용 어디에도 해당하지 않아 적용 가능한 스킬이 없습니다. 이에 따라 일반 학술 작성 방식으로 진행합니다.
China's pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2060 and a peak in emissions before 2030 has made its climate policy apparatus one of the most consequential variables in global efforts to limit warming, and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878), arrives at a moment when the credibility of China's decarbonization trajectory is under renewed international scrutiny. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries, China occupies a structurally contradictory position in global climate governance: it is both the chief obstacle to rapid mitigation and the chief supplier of the technologies that make mitigation possible elsewhere. The article's placement in a journal dedicated to contemporary Asian political economy signals that its contribution is not merely technical or environmental but concerns the deeper institutional and market logics that shape how an authoritarian developmental state manages an energy transition of unprecedented scale.
The article's title itself frames its central analytical architecture around three intersecting dimensions — transition, governance, and market — a framing that suggests the piece resists treating China's climate policy as a single coherent program and instead disaggregates it into distinct but interacting subsystems. This is consistent with a growing body of scholarship in the Journal of Contemporary Asia that has long emphasized the fragmented, multi-level character of Chinese policymaking, where central directives from Beijing are refracted through provincial and municipal implementation that often diverges from stated national targets. By foregrounding "governance" alongside "transition" and "market," the article implicitly argues that understanding China's climate trajectory requires attention not just to targets and technologies but to the administrative and regulatory scaffolding — including the relationship between state planning bodies and increasingly market-oriented instruments — that determines whether stated commitments translate into measurable outcomes. This tripartite framing positions the piece within debates over whether China's climate governance model represents a genuine hybridization of state control and market mechanism, or whether market instruments remain subordinate tools deployed at the discretion of political authorities.
Situated within broader regional and global trends, the article's focus on China resonates with a wider pattern across Asian political economy scholarship examining how late-developing and state-capitalist economies reconcile growth imperatives with climate commitments. China's experience is frequently invoked as a reference case for other Asian economies — from Vietnam's coal-dependent industrial base to India's parallel efforts to expand renewable capacity while sustaining energy access — precisely because Beijing has demonstrated that large-scale state direction can accelerate clean-technology deployment at a pace market mechanisms alone have rarely achieved elsewhere. At the same time, the tension the article's framing implies between top-down governance and market instruments mirrors debates within international development and ODA circles about the appropriate balance between state-led industrial policy and market liberalization in climate finance architectures, including instruments associated with the Green Climate Fund and bilateral climate cooperation programs that increasingly look to China's domestic experience — for better or worse — as a template or counterpoint.
For policy practitioners and researchers engaged with development cooperation, the significance of an article probing China's climate governance lies in its implications for how international actors calibrate engagement with Beijing on climate diplomacy, technology transfer, and South-South cooperation. If, as the article's framing suggests, China's climate transition is substantially mediated by governance structures that condition how market instruments function, then external actors — whether multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, or civil society organizations monitoring emissions pledges — cannot treat China's carbon market or renewable energy targets as self-executing commitments comparable to those in more liberalized market economies. This has direct bearing on how institutions such as the Asian Development Bank or the World Bank structure climate-related lending and technical assistance involving Chinese counterparts, and it underscores why civil society and research institutions tracking global climate finance, including organizations like IOCSS, must attend closely to the governance layer rather than headline emissions targets alone when assessing the credibility of national climate commitments.
Looking forward, the article's publication in the Journal of Contemporary Asia invites researchers to treat China's climate policy not as a fixed endpoint but as an evolving experiment whose governance and market components may continue to shift in relative weight as domestic economic pressures, including slowing growth and local government fiscal constraints, interact with international pressure ahead of successive climate summits. Practitioners working on ODA and civil society engagement in Asia would do well to monitor how the balance between state direction and market mechanism described in this framing evolves, since shifts in that balance are likely to shape not only China's own emissions trajectory but also the terms on which Chinese climate technology, finance, and policy models diffuse to other developing economies across Asia and beyond. Future scholarship building on this article's tripartite lens would benefit from empirically tracing specific provincial or sectoral cases where transition, governance, and market pressures visibly collide, offering the kind of granular evidence that can move the debate beyond aggregate national targets toward a more institutionally grounded understanding of how China's climate transition is actually governed in practice.