[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-01
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The article at the supplied DOI turns out to be a book review, not an original empirical study — I verified this via web search before drafting, so the piece below is grounded in the actual book (Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang, *China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market*, Edward Elgar, 2025) and the review of it in the *Journal of Contemporary Asia* by Geoffrey C. Chen (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), published online March 12, 2026, rather than on the empty abstract originally provided.
China's climate trajectory has become one of the central variables in the global effort to limit warming, and the appearance of a new scholarly treatment of its policy architecture arrives at a moment when that variable looks increasingly unstable. *China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market*, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in October 2025, is the work of Alex Y. Lo of York Business School at York St John University and Chen Xiang of the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 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, the 218-page volume lands amid what the reviewer describes as a period of "increased global uncertainty and economic instability" — precisely the conditions under which China's decarbonization commitments are being tested against domestic economic pressures and international trade tensions.
The book's core contribution, according to Chen's review, is a framework for reading Chinese climate governance through three interpretive lenses: environmental authoritarianism, the centralized developmental state, and ecological civilization. Crucially, the reviewer notes that Lo and Xiang deploy these not as rigid classifications but as analytical tools, offering what the review calls "a critical examination of that institutionalisation and the structural challenges for China's climate policy over the past decade." This is a meaningful distinction for scholars of authoritarian environmental governance, since much of the existing literature treats "environmental authoritarianism" as a fixed descriptive label for China's top-down regulatory style rather than as one lens among several competing accounts of how Beijing actually coordinates decarbonization across ministries, provinces, and state-owned enterprises. The authors' decision to examine the intersection of state, market, and society — rather than treating climate governance as a purely top-down exercise — reflects a broader methodological shift toward hybrid governance models in Chinese politics scholarship.
This hybrid framing connects directly to wider trends in Asian political economy research, where the question is less whether a developmental state can decarbonize and more how market instruments interact with continued state control. The book's attention to "market-based and industry-focused policy interventions," per its publisher description, situates it alongside a growing body of work on China's carbon trading schemes and industrial decarbonization mandates — instruments that sit uneasily between genuine market signals and state-directed allocation. For IOCSS's broader interest in civil society space across Asia, the relevant implication is that Lo and Xiang's "society" dimension raises the question of what role, if any, non-state actors play in a governance system the reviewer characterizes as producing "fragmented climate governance under authoritarian systems." A fragmented but still authoritarian structure is a different civil society environment than either a fully centralized command system or a pluralistic one, and the distinction matters for any donor or NGO calculating where engagement on climate issues is administratively possible inside China.
For ODA practitioners and climate-finance institutions, the policy implications center on the same fragmentation the review identifies. If climate governance in China is distributed unevenly across "empirical cases," as Chen's review puts it, then bilateral and multilateral partners — whether green-technology cooperation bodies like Korea's National Institute of Green Technology or multilateral climate funds — cannot treat Chinese sub-national implementation as uniform. A province or industry sector operating under strong market-based incentives may respond very differently to cooperative overtures than one still governed primarily through administrative directive. The review's assessment that the book provides "a careful and comprehensive engagement with both theory and empirical cases in China's climate governance" suggests the volume itself is a useful diagnostic tool for practitioners trying to map which parts of China's climate bureaucracy are susceptible to market-oriented cooperation and which remain closed administrative domains — a distinction with direct consequences for how international green-technology transfer or carbon-market linkage proposals should be sequenced.
Looking forward, the research significance of Lo and Xiang's contribution, as read through Chen's review, lies in refusing a simple binary verdict on whether Chinese climate governance is succeeding or failing. Instead, the reviewer credits the authors with a "balanced assessment and critical examination of policy effectiveness," which is the more analytically useful frame for practitioners who need to calibrate expectations rather than celebrate or dismiss China's decarbonization program wholesale. As China's economic slowdown and continued reliance on heavy industry complicate its stated climate commitments, researchers tracking the country's political economy will need exactly this kind of disaggregated, institution-by-institution account rather than aggregate emissions trend lines alone. For IOCSS's own research agenda on the intersection of governance, market reform, and civil society across Asia, the book — and its reception in a leading area-studies journal — signals that the next wave of China climate scholarship is moving toward institutional granularity, and that any comparative ODA or civil-society analysis of climate cooperation with China should be built on that same disaggregated foundation rather than on generalized assumptions about authoritarian environmental governance.