[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-11
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
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China's climate policy occupies an increasingly central place in debates over the future of global decarbonization, precisely because the country's trajectory now determines much of what happens to worldwide emissions trends. As the world's largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases and the single largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, China sits at the intersection of climate governance and industrial policy in a way no other state does. It is in this context that the Journal of Contemporary Asia has published "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878), a 2026 contribution that situates Chinese climate governance within the broader literature on Asian political economy. The article's framing—transition, governance, and market—signals an analytical ambition to move beyond simple characterizations of China as either a climate leader or laggard, and instead to examine the institutional machinery through which Beijing is attempting to reconcile continued economic growth with its stated climate commitments.
The core analytical contribution suggested by the article's title lies in treating China's climate policy not as a single coherent strategy but as an evolving negotiation among three distinct logics: the structural transition of the energy and industrial base, the governance apparatus that coordinates central and subnational actors, and the market instruments increasingly deployed to allocate the costs of decarbonization. This tripartite framing resonates with China's own policy architecture, which includes the "dual carbon" targets announced in 2020—peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060—and the national carbon Emissions Trading Scheme launched in 2021 under the oversight of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. By placing governance and market mechanisms alongside transition dynamics, the article implicitly engages with a long-standing puzzle in the study of Chinese political economy: how a system built on strong central planning through instruments such as the Five-Year Plan process can simultaneously expand the role of price signals and tradable permits without ceding the state's commanding position over strategic sectors.
Read against broader regional and global trends, the article's concerns connect directly to debates that have reshaped ODA and development cooperation discourse over the past decade. China's domestic climate governance choices are not isolated from its external economic engagement; the same state institutions that manage the national ETS and the dual carbon targets also oversee overseas energy financing decisions, including the 2021 pledge to stop building new coal-fired power projects abroad under the Belt and Road Initiative. This linkage matters for scholars and practitioners in the Journal of Contemporary Asia's traditional readership, since it illustrates how domestic market-building exercises inside China—carbon pricing, renewable energy quotas, industrial policy for solar and battery manufacturing—shape the terms on which Chinese capital, technology, and state-linked institutions interact with developing countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For researchers of civil society and political economy, the governance dimension is equally significant, since China's model of climate policy implementation relies heavily on top-down administrative targets and party-state coordination rather than the kind of pluralistic civil society mobilization that characterizes climate politics in liberal democracies, raising questions about the transferability of its market instruments to political contexts with different civic infrastructures.
The policy implications of situating China's climate transition within a governance-and-market framework are substantial for both domestic and international audiences. Domestically, the tension between administrative targets set through the Five-Year Plan system and the price-discovery function of the national ETS raises questions about whether market mechanisms in China function as genuine allocative tools or as instruments subordinated to pre-determined political targets—a question with direct relevance for other developing economies in Asia considering carbon pricing as part of their own nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Internationally, the article's framing is relevant to multilateral climate finance architecture, since institutions such as the Green Climate Fund and bilateral donors increasingly must account for China's dual status as both a recipient-turned-provider of climate-related development finance and a competitor in clean technology markets. This dual positioning complicates conventional ODA categories, since much of China's climate-related external engagement does not flow through traditional development assistance channels tracked by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, but instead through state-owned enterprises, policy banks, and bilateral investment arrangements tied to its own domestic transition imperatives.
Looking forward, the article's framing invites further empirical research into how the three dimensions of transition, governance, and market actually interact at the subnational level in China, where provincial implementation of carbon targets has historically varied considerably, and where local governments retain significant discretion over how aggressively to enforce emissions constraints relative to growth targets. For practitioners engaged in Asian political economy and development cooperation, the lesson is that assessments of China's climate policy cannot rest on national-level pledges alone, but must track the institutional friction between central mandates, market instruments such as the ETS, and the governance capacity of provincial and municipal authorities tasked with implementation. As international climate negotiations move toward subsequent Conference of the Parties sessions and as the 2030 peaking deadline approaches, scholarship of the kind published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia will remain essential for disentangling rhetoric from institutional reality, and for helping both researchers and policymakers in the wider Asian region calibrate their expectations about what China's governance-market hybrid model can and cannot deliver for global decarbonization.