[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-08
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
작성 지시를 받았으므로 먼저 적용 가능한 스킬을 확인했습니다. 이 과제는 ODA 제안서·보고서(oda-master-writer 계열), 발표자료(oda-ppt-design), 회의·미팅 보고서(plaud-meeting-report), 통화·회의 기록 인용(call-meeting-records) 중 어느 것에도 해당하지 않는 "학술지 논문 기반 분석 기사 작성"이므로, 맞는 스킬이 없습니다. 이를 먼저 밝히고 직접 작성을 진행합니다.
China's trajectory toward carbon peaking and neutrality has become one of the defining variables in global climate governance, and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market," arrives at a moment when the credibility of that trajectory is under renewed international scrutiny. As the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China occupies a paradoxical position in the global climate order: a state whose domestic governance choices now have outsized consequences for whether international mitigation targets remain plausible. The article's placement in a journal historically devoted to the political economy of Asian development signals that its contribution is not merely technical but institutional, situating China's climate policy within the broader analytical traditions of transition studies, governance theory, and market regulation.
The article's own tripartite framing — transition, governance, and market — points to an analytical structure that treats China's climate policy not as a single coherent program but as an interaction among three distinct logics that do not always align. China's "dual carbon" targets, announced by President Xi Jinping at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020 and subsequently codified through the country's Five-Year Plan cycles, commit Beijing to peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Operationalizing those targets, however, has required an expanding governance apparatus, most visibly the national Emissions Trading Scheme launched in 2021 under the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which initially covered only the power generation sector before plans for expansion into steel, cement, and aluminum. An article organized around "transition, governance, and market" is well positioned to interrogate the gap between top-down planning targets set in Beijing and the market-based instruments, such as the ETS, that are meant to deliver them at the provincial and enterprise level — a tension long recognized in China's political economy literature on central-local implementation.
Read against broader regional trends, the article's focus on China fits a wider pattern within Asian political economy scholarship, where the Journal of Contemporary Asia has long published work examining how developmental states in East and Southeast Asia reconcile industrial policy with environmental commitments. China's climate governance choices reverberate well beyond its borders through the Belt and Road Initiative, where Beijing's 2021 pledge to stop financing new overseas coal plants marked a significant shift in how Chinese state banks and the China Development Bank approach green and non-green infrastructure finance in recipient countries across South and Southeast Asia and Africa. For institutions monitoring official development assistance and climate finance flows, China's domestic transition and its external investment posture are increasingly treated as two faces of the same governance problem, since donor and recipient states alike are recalibrating expectations about Chinese-financed infrastructure in light of Beijing's own decarbonization commitments.
The research and policy significance of an article framed around governance and market mechanisms lies in its relevance to institutions that assess climate policy credibility, including the UNFCCC process, the International Energy Agency, and multilateral development banks that incorporate country-level climate policy and institutional reviews, such as the World Bank's Country Climate and Development Reports, into their lending and advisory work. Scholars and practitioners examining China's carbon market design, its coal-dependent power sector — which still accounted for more than half of China's electricity generation as of the mid-2020s — and the institutional capacity of provincial regulators to enforce emissions trading rules will find in this kind of analysis a basis for assessing whether China's stated transition pathway is governance-enabled or governance-constrained. This matters directly for civil society organizations and ODA practitioners who increasingly frame climate finance conditionality and monitoring frameworks around the robustness of a recipient or partner state's domestic regulatory institutions rather than its stated targets alone.
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners tracking China's climate policy should watch closely how the expansion of the national ETS beyond the power sector proceeds through China's 15th Five-Year Plan period, and whether provincial implementation capacity keeps pace with Beijing's stated market-based ambitions. For IOCSS's own research agenda on ODA, civil society, and global political economy, the Journal of Contemporary Asia's treatment of China's climate transition offers a template for analyzing other Asian states where governance capacity, rather than policy announcement, determines whether climate and development commitments translate into measurable outcomes. As international climate negotiations continue to treat China's domestic governance choices as a bellwether for global mitigation feasibility, scholarship that disaggregates transition rhetoric from governance mechanics and market performance will remain indispensable for both the academic and practitioner communities assessing the credibility of state-led decarbonization.