[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-04
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
A new book under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Alex Y. Lo and Chen Xiang's China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2025), arrives at a moment when China's role in the global climate order has become impossible to ignore. As the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China occupies a paradoxical position: it is both the chief obstacle and the chief enabler of the global energy transition. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks how state, market, and civil society interact across the development landscape, a book that explicitly frames its inquiry around the "intersection of the state, market, and society" in Chinese climate governance offers a timely lens on a question that reverberates well beyond China's borders — namely, whether authoritarian-market hybrids can deliver decarbonization at the scale and speed the climate crisis demands.
The book's core contribution, as reflected in its review by Geoffrey C. Chen in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, lies in its attempt to give a "balanced account" of China's governance approaches rather than treating Beijing's climate policy as either a top-down command exercise or a market liberalization story. Lo, who holds a position at York Business School, York St John University in the United Kingdom, and Xiang, based at the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, draw on examples of market-based and industry-focused policy interventions to show how China has sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while preserving the Communist Party's steering role over the economy. This dual-track approach — pairing administrative mandates such as energy intensity targets with market instruments such as emissions trading — is consistent with Xiang's broader research agenda; a companion paper, "China's energy policy: A rolling-window analysis reveals a predominantly reactive governance model," forthcoming in Energy Research & Social Science in 2026, similarly argues that Chinese energy governance has evolved reactively rather than through a single coherent master plan. Read together, these works suggest that China's climate institutions are less a finished architecture than an accumulating patchwork of pilot programs, five-year plan targets, and course corrections.
This governance pattern resonates with wider trends across Asian political economy that IOCSS has long monitored: the blending of state capacity with selectively liberalized markets to pursue industrial policy goals that are officially framed as environmental but carry heavy developmental and geopolitical freight. China's national carbon emissions trading scheme, launched to cover the power sector and gradually expanding, exemplifies the kind of "market-based" intervention the book examines, while the country's dominance of global battery and solar-panel supply chains illustrates how industrial policy and climate policy have become functionally inseparable in Beijing's strategy. Xiang's related 2025 article with Terry van Gevelt, "China's global leadership aspirations and domestic support for climate policy," published in Ecological Economics, points to another dimension relevant to regional political economy: that China's pursuit of international climate leadership is not purely an external posture but is bound up with domestic legitimacy politics, a dynamic that parallels how other developing and middle-income states in Asia use climate commitments to negotiate both international standing and domestic developmental mandates.
For researchers and policymakers engaged in ODA and development cooperation, the governance questions this book raises have direct practical stakes. Multilateral institutions and bilateral donors increasingly calibrate climate finance and technology-transfer partnerships around assumptions about recipient and partner-country governance capacity; a text that maps how China's state-market-society triad actually functions in practice — rather than how it is officially described — gives practitioners a more grounded basis for assessing comparable governance arrangements elsewhere in the region, from Vietnam's state-led renewable energy build-out to Indonesia's managed energy transition partnerships. The book's explicit framing for "think tanks, government research units, and practitioners in the field," as noted in its publisher description, signals that Lo and Xiang intend the work to inform policy design, not merely academic debate. This is particularly salient given Xiang's parallel work on carbon border adjustment mechanisms — his 2026 article "Scaling carbon clubs under CBAM: Incentives and asymmetric burdens," co-authored with Xian Hu, Mun Ho, and Jing Cao and slated for Environmental Research Letters, examines how instruments like the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism reshape the incentives facing exporting economies such as China, a question with direct implications for how Asian manufacturing economies calibrate domestic decarbonization against trade exposure.
Looking ahead, the publication of this book review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia — a journal with a long track record of scrutinizing state-capital relations across the region — suggests that scholarly attention to China's climate governance is shifting from descriptive accounts of targets and pledges toward more granular institutional analysis of how policy instruments are actually implemented, contested, and revised. For IOCSS's own research agenda on civil society and political economy, the comparatively limited role attributed to societal actors in Lo and Xiang's "state, market, and society" framework is itself worth flagging: if the book's own account emphasizes state and market dynamics more heavily than civil society's independent agency, that asymmetry mirrors a broader empirical reality in China's environmental governance space, where civil society organizations operate under tighter constraints than their counterparts in many other Asian democracies. Future comparative research — ideally extending Xiang's rolling-window methodology to other reactive-governance states, or placing China's carbon market pilots alongside ASEAN emissions trading experiments — would help practitioners judge how transferable China's model of transition governance actually is, and where its reliance on centralized market-making diverges sharply from the more pluralistic, civil-society-inflected transitions underway elsewhere in Asia.