[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-02
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
No skill in my current list matches this task — it is not an ODA proposal/report, presentation, meeting report, or call-record task, so none of the mapped skills (oda-master-writer/oda-word-writer/oda-hwpx-writer/kofih-consulting-proposal, oda-ppt-design, plaud-meeting-report, call-meeting-records) applies. I'm proceeding without a skill, as instructed when none fits.
Here is the analytical article:
China's climate policy has become one of the most consequential variables in global efforts to manage the energy transition, and the publication of "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878) arrives at a moment when the stakes of understanding Beijing's regulatory architecture have never been higher. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the dominant manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries, China occupies a structurally unique position: it is both the principal obstacle to, and the principal engine of, the low-carbon transition that multilateral climate governance depends upon. The Journal of Contemporary Asia, a venue historically associated with critical political economy analysis of Asian development trajectories, provides an appropriate scholarly home for an inquiry that treats climate policy not as a technical or purely environmental matter but as a question of governance and market structure—precisely the framing signaled by the article's title and its stated keywords of transition, governance, policy, and market.
The organizing triad of the article's title—transition, governance, and market—points to an analytical strategy that resists treating China's climate policy as a single coherent program and instead disaggregates it into distinct but interacting domains. "Transition" implies attention to the sequencing and pace of China's shift away from coal-dependent growth, a process shaped by the dual carbon targets that President Xi Jinping announced to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020: peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. "Governance" suggests an examination of the institutional mechanisms—central ministries, provincial implementation, and state-owned enterprise compliance—through which these targets are translated into binding obligations. "Market," meanwhile, points toward the instruments meant to discipline emissions through price signals rather than administrative fiat, most notably the national carbon emissions trading scheme that the Ministry of Ecology and Environment formally launched in July 2021, building on earlier municipal pilots such as the one established in Shenzhen in 2013. By framing these three elements together, the article implicitly argues that China's climate policy cannot be understood through any single lens—neither as pure state planning nor as market liberalization—but as a hybrid governance model whose internal tensions are themselves analytically significant.
This tripartite framing resonates with, and extends, broader debates in the political economy of Asian development that the Journal of Contemporary Asia has long cultivated. Much of the existing literature on state-led development in China and its neighbors has focused on the tension between central planning instruments, embodied in successive Five-Year Plans—the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) being the most recent to incorporate explicit decarbonization targets—and the partial marketization of resource allocation through instruments like the ETS. The article's attention to governance as a distinct category suggests it engages with scholarship on fragmented authoritarianism, in which central mandates on emissions intensity are implemented unevenly across provinces with divergent fiscal incentives tied to coal-based industry and local employment. This tension is not unique to China; it echoes governance dilemmas visible across other Asian economies pursuing simultaneous industrial upgrading and emissions reduction, from Indonesia's management of its nickel and coal sectors to Vietnam's rapid, state-mediated expansion of solar capacity. Situating China within this regional pattern allows the article to speak to a readership interested in comparative Asian political economy rather than China specialists alone.
For policy audiences and researchers tracking official development assistance, civil society space, and global political economy—the core concerns of institutions such as IOCSS—the article's focus on the interplay between governance and market mechanisms carries direct relevance to how international actors calibrate engagement with China's climate architecture. Multilateral development banks and bilateral donors increasingly frame climate finance and technical cooperation in terms of compatibility with recipient-country market mechanisms; an analysis that treats China's carbon market as embedded within, rather than independent of, state governance structures implies that external actors cannot assume the ETS will function as a Western-style cap-and-trade system insulated from political direction. This has practical implications for how green Belt and Road Initiative financing, clean energy technology transfer, and bilateral climate diplomacy are assessed: counterparts negotiating with Chinese state-owned enterprises or provincial authorities must account for the layered governance structure the article identifies, rather than treating market instruments as self-executing. For researchers, the piece's publication in a 2026 issue of a leading area-studies journal signals continuing scholarly appetite for disaggregated, institutionally grounded accounts of China's environmental governance, in contrast to more aggregate, outcome-focused analyses common in economics-oriented climate journals.
Looking forward, the questions this article raises will only grow more pressing as China's 2030 peaking commitment approaches and as the credibility of its carbon market as a genuine price-discovery mechanism comes under closer international scrutiny. Practitioners engaged in climate diplomacy, green finance structuring, or technical assistance programs involving Chinese counterparts would benefit from treating the governance layer—not merely the stated targets or market design—as the decisive variable determining implementation outcomes. Researchers in the field of Asian political economy, meanwhile, have reason to pursue comparative extensions of this governance-transition-market framework to other major emerging emitters, testing whether the hybrid model identified in the Journal of Contemporary Asia article is a distinctively Chinese configuration or a more general feature of late-industrializing states attempting to decarbonize without relinquishing centralized economic control. Either direction of inquiry underscores that the climate transition, in China and across Asia, remains inseparable from the deeper political economy questions of who governs markets and to what end.