[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-12
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
본 지침에 따라 먼저 확인합니다: 이 과제는 IOCSS 소속 연구분석가로서 학술지 논문 정보를 바탕으로 한 분석 기사(에세이) 작성이며, 제공된 스킬 목록(ODA 제안서/보고서, PPT, 회의보고서, 통화기록 인용 등) 중 이 유형에 맞는 스킬은 없습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없음을 밝히고 바로 작성합니다.
China's efforts to reconcile rapid economic transition with binding climate commitments have become one of the defining questions of contemporary Asian political economy, and a new article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" (2026, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2026.2634878), arrives at a moment when the stakes of that reconciliation could not be 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 paradoxical position in global climate governance: it is both the central obstacle to, and the central enabler of, the energy transition that international climate frameworks demand. The article's framing around three terms — transition, governance, and market — signals an analytical ambition to move past simplistic narratives that treat Beijing's climate policy as either pure state planning or pure market liberalization, and instead to interrogate how these two logics interact within China's distinctive political economy.
The core analytical contribution suggested by the article's title lies in its triad of transition, governance, and market, which implies a departure from accounts that isolate China's climate policy as a technical or environmental matter divorced from its political economy context. Framing climate policy through governance invites scrutiny of the institutional architecture that has emerged since China's commitment, announced by President Xi Jinping before the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 — the so-called dual carbon goals that have since structured the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) and reorganized ministerial mandates across the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. By placing "market" alongside "governance," the article also gestures toward the uneven, state-mediated character of China's carbon market mechanisms, most notably the national Emissions Trading Scheme launched in 2021, which initially covered only the power generation sector and has been criticized by scholars for allocation methods, price signals, and compliance enforcement that diverge markedly from the cap-and-trade systems operating in the European Union.
Situating this article within broader regional and global trends in political economy research on Asia, the Journal of Contemporary Asia itself has long served as a venue for critical, often heterodox analyses of state-market relations across the region, and this piece extends that tradition into the climate domain at a time when comparable debates are unfolding across Vietnam, Indonesia, and India regarding the pace and ownership structure of their own energy transitions. China's trajectory carries outsized weight for these comparisons because of its dual role as a domestic emitter and as an external financier and exporter of both coal infrastructure and renewable technology through instruments such as the Belt and Road Initiative, whose green investment guidelines have been repeatedly revised since 2021 in response to international criticism of continued overseas coal financing. The article's attention to governance mechanisms thus resonates with a wider scholarly concern, visible in recent Journal of Contemporary Asia issues and cognate outlets, about whether authoritarian or hybrid political systems can deliver credible, enforceable climate commitments without the accountability mechanisms associated with liberal-democratic regulatory states.
For policy practitioners and researchers working on official development assistance, civil society engagement, and transition finance, the implications of this analysis extend well beyond China's borders. Multilateral institutions, including bodies coordinating under the Green Climate Fund and regional development banks such as the Asian Development Bank, continually calibrate their climate finance strategies against China's domestic policy signals, since Chinese manufacturing capacity in solar photovoltaic and battery storage supply chains directly affects the cost curves that determine the feasibility of renewable deployment financed through ODA channels elsewhere in Asia and Africa. An article that interrogates the governance-market nexus within China's transition offers a corrective to donor-side assumptions that market mechanisms alone, once introduced, will function as intended; the uneven performance of the national ETS since 2021 suggests that civil society and research organizations such as IOCSS should treat market-based instruments in authoritarian contexts as conditional on the surrounding regulatory and enforcement architecture rather than as self-executing policy tools.
Looking forward, researchers tracking the intersection of climate policy and political economy in Asia should watch closely how China's governance innovations — whether expansions of the national ETS to sectors beyond power generation, adjustments to the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan's successor framework expected around 2026, or new disclosure requirements tied to the 2060 carbon neutrality pledge — are received both domestically and by trading and investment partners across the Belt and Road network. Practitioners engaged in ODA and climate finance programming would benefit from treating the Journal of Contemporary Asia article's transition-governance-market framework as an analytical checklist rather than a settled verdict, testing each of its three dimensions against emerging empirical cases such as provincial-level implementation gaps or the integration of carbon accounting into state-owned enterprise performance evaluations. As COP processes continue to press major emitters for more ambitious nationally determined contributions, scholarship of this kind, grounded in the specific institutional mechanics of Chinese climate governance rather than aggregate emissions statistics alone, will remain essential for distinguishing genuine structural transition from incremental policy adjustment.