[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-03
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
Before drafting, per my standing instruction to check for a matching skill before any "작성" task: none of the configured skills (oda-master-writer/oda-word-writer/oda-hwpx-writer/kofih-consulting-proposal, oda-ppt-design, plaud-meeting-report, call-meeting-records) apply here — this is an analytical commentary on a journal article, not an ODA proposal, PPT, or meeting record. No matching skill exists, so I'm proceeding directly as instructed when that's the case.
One evidentiary note: the supplied abstract/summary field is blank, so I cannot attribute specific arguments or findings to the article beyond its title, journal, and publication year. I've written the piece accordingly — using the title's three analytic categories (transition, governance, market) as the organizing frame, and drawing on well-established, named China climate-policy facts (the 2030/2060 dual-carbon targets, the national carbon market, the Five-Year Plan cycle) as contextual anchors rather than claims about what the article itself says.
China's climate trajectory has become one of the central variables in global efforts to manage decarbonization, and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" (slated for 2026 publication), arrives at a moment when the stakes of that trajectory are difficult to overstate. As the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries, China occupies a paradoxical position in the global climate order: it is both the chief obstacle to rapid emissions reduction and the chief supplier of the technologies that make such reduction possible elsewhere. The article's framing around three terms—transition, governance, and market—signals an analytical ambition to move past the familiar binary of "China as climate villain versus China as green superpower" and instead examine the institutional machinery that connects Beijing's policy pronouncements to actual outcomes on the ground.
The three organizing categories in the title point to distinct but interlocking bodies of scholarship that the Journal of Contemporary Asia, a leading venue for critical political economy research on Asia, is well positioned to synthesize. "Transition" invokes China's own stated targets: carbon emissions peaking before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, commitments first announced by President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly in September 2020 and subsequently embedded in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025). "Governance" points toward the question of how a one-party state with a fragmented bureaucracy—spanning the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and provincial-level implementers—translates central targets into enforceable local action, a perennial puzzle in China studies given the well-documented gap between central mandates and local compliance incentives tied to GDP growth. "Market" gestures toward the instruments meant to bridge that gap, most notably the national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) launched in July 2021, which initially covered only the power generation sector but was designed with the intention of expanding to steel, cement, and petrochemicals. An article organized around these three terms is positioned to interrogate whether market mechanisms are genuinely displacing administrative command-and-control methods in China's climate policy mix, or whether they remain subordinate to the Communist Party's governance architecture.
Placing this inquiry within broader regional and global trends in ODA and political economy, China's domestic climate governance cannot be separated from its external posture as a development financier. The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, has faced sustained scrutiny over the carbon intensity of its energy financing, prompting Xi's September 2021 pledge at the UN General Assembly to stop building new coal-fired power plants abroad. This external commitment runs parallel to, and is arguably legitimated by, the domestic transition narrative that the Journal of Contemporary Asia article appears to probe. For other Asian economies—Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines among them—China's dual identity as both a recipient of international climate finance scrutiny and a bilateral lender under instruments like the Just Energy Transition Partnerships model creates a distinctive comparative case: unlike most Global South states studied in ODA literature, China's climate transition is self-financed and state-directed rather than donor-dependent, which has implications for how comparative civil society and governance scholars assess the universality of market-based climate instruments promoted by institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Looking ahead, researchers and practitioners tracking Asian political economy should treat this Journal of Contemporary Asia contribution as a prompt to revisit assumptions about the sequencing of market reform and governance reform in climate policy more broadly. As China's 15th Five-Year Plan period approaches and the national ETS faces pressure to expand beyond the power sector, empirical attention to whether market instruments are deepening or merely formalizing existing administrative controls will be essential for assessing the credibility of the 2030 and 2060 targets. For civil society and governance scholars at institutes such as IOCSS, the practical task is to monitor how China's domestic transition experience is cited, selectively or comprehensively, in the climate finance and technical assistance conversations occurring across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, since the rhetorical power of China's green industrial achievements is likely to outpace, for some time, verified evidence about the governance conditions that produced them.