[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-30
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's pledge to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, first announced by President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly in September 2020, has made the country's domestic climate governance one of the most consequential and closely watched subjects in contemporary political economy. It is in this context that the Journal of Contemporary Asia published, in its 2026 Ahead-of-Print section, a review by Geoffrey C. Chen, Associate Professor in the Department of China Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, of the book China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market, authored by Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang and released by Edward Elgar Publishing on 16 October 2025. The review, bearing DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878, was received on 16 February 2026 and accepted the following day, situating it as a timely scholarly engagement with a 218-page monograph that seeks to map how Beijing is managing the twin imperatives of economic transition and climate risk.
The book under review, according to its publisher description, offers a comprehensive analysis of China's major policy interventions for decarbonizing the economy, framed explicitly around the intersection of state, market, and society. Lo, who holds a professorship in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Chen Xiang structure their argument around domestic policies and relations rather than China's external climate diplomacy, moving from an account of the institutional framework of environmental and climate governance to a series of market-based and industry-focused interventions intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This structural choice is significant: by foregrounding governance architecture before turning to specific market mechanisms, the authors signal that China's decarbonization trajectory cannot be understood as a purely technocratic or market-driven process, but must be read through the institutional logics that condition how the central and provincial state apparatus interacts with enterprises and social actors around carbon-intensive sectors.
This emphasis on the state-market-society triad resonates with a broader body of scholarship on Chinese environmental governance that has increasingly moved away from simple authoritarian-versus-liberal binaries toward more granular accounts of institutional adaptation. The concept of "authoritarian environmentalism" that has circulated in recent literature on China's climate and energy sector finds an implicit counterpart in Lo and Chen Xiang's attention to market instruments, suggesting that Beijing's approach increasingly blends command-style regulation with experiments in carbon pricing and industry-specific incentive schemes. For a regional and global political economy audience, this matters because China's domestic choices ripple outward: as the world's largest emitter and largest manufacturer of renewable energy technology, the governance model documented in this book has direct bearing on how Belt and Road-linked energy financing, South-South technology transfer, and multilateral climate finance architectures evolve. Civil society and ODA researchers tracking how developing countries absorb Chinese green technology and governance templates have a direct stake in understanding the domestic institutional preconditions that Lo and Chen Xiang describe.
For practitioners in government research units and think tanks, which the publisher explicitly identifies as part of the book's target audience alongside scholars and students of environmental politics and policy, the practical significance of this work lies in its promise of a "balanced account" of China's governance approach, rather than a polemical treatment favoring either state control or market liberalization narratives. Geoffrey C. Chen's own scholarly background, including his 2016 monograph Governing Sustainable Energies in China and his 2022 co-authored article on renewable energy governance as a source of Chinese soft power, positions him as a reviewer well placed to assess whether Lo and Chen Xiang's framework advances or merely restates existing debates about the political economy of Chinese decarbonization. That a specialist in China's energy governance and state-society relations was commissioned to review this book for a journal explicitly devoted to contemporary Asia underscores how climate policy analysis has become inseparable from broader questions of regime type, institutional capacity, and the domestic political economy of industrial transition in the region.
Looking ahead, the appearance of this review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2026 suggests that scholarly attention to China's climate governance is entering a phase of synthesis, where monographs like Lo and Chen Xiang's attempt to consolidate a decade or more of policy experimentation—spanning pilot carbon markets, industrial decarbonization mandates, and evolving central-local governance relations—into a coherent analytical framework centered on the state-market-society nexus. For researchers and practitioners in development, civil society, and political economy fields, the key task going forward will be to test this framework against empirical variation across China's provinces and sectors, and to ask how transferable its governance lessons are to other large emitting economies in the Global South that look to China as both a competitor and a model. As institutions such as IOCSS continue to track the interplay between authoritarian governance, market mechanisms, and civil society space in development contexts, works like this one offer a necessary, if partial, empirical anchor: a reminder that China's climate transition is not simply a technical decarbonization exercise but a contested governance project whose domestic institutional choices carry consequences well beyond its own borders.
Sources: - [China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market — Journal of Contemporary Asia](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878) - [China's Climate Policy (Edward Elgar Publishing)](https://www.elgaronline.com/monobook/book/9781035341269/9781035341269.xml) - [China's Climate Policy — Amazon listing](https://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Climate-Policy-Transition-Governance/dp/1035341255) - [Prof. Alex Lo, Chinese University of Hong Kong](https://www.ees.cuhk.edu.hk/staff/prof-alex-lo/) - [Geoffrey Chun-fung Chen, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University](https://scholar.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/persons/geoffrey-chun-fung-chen/)
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