[JCA] China’s Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-13
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
Found solid source material: this is a review (by Geoffrey C. Chen, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) of the book *China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market* by Alex Y. Lo (York St John University) and Chen Xiang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Edward Elgar, 2025. I'll now write the analytical article grounded in these verified facts.
China's position as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously the leading manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles makes its domestic climate governance a matter of consequence far beyond its borders. It is in this context that the Journal of Contemporary Asia has published a review, authored by Geoffrey C. Chen of the Department of China Studies at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, of a new book that attempts a systematic accounting of how Beijing actually governs the climate transition: China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market, written by Alex Y. Lo of York Business School at York St John University in the United Kingdom and Chen Xiang of the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and published by Edward Elgar in 2025. As China recalibrates its growth model amid slowing property-driven expansion and intensifying trade friction with the United States and the European Union over green technology exports, understanding the institutional machinery behind its climate commitments is no longer a narrow environmental question but a central issue in global political economy.
The core contribution identified by Chen's review is the book's explicit treatment of what it calls "critical examination of that institutionalisation and the structural challenges for China's climate policy over the past decade." Rather than presenting Chinese climate action as a monolithic top-down program, Lo and Xiang deploy three analytical concepts — environmental authoritarianism, the centralised developmental state, and ecological civilisation — not as settled categories but, in the reviewer's words, as context-dependent tools for interpreting specific cases. This is methodologically significant: much of the existing literature on Chinese environmental governance tends to treat "authoritarian environmentalism" as an explanatory endpoint, implying that centralized political control straightforwardly translates into effective climate outcomes. Lo and Xiang's approach, as characterized in the review, instead treats governance capacity as variable and contingent, built chapter by chapter around specific policy domains including the environmental state, state-society relations, global leadership and advocacy, renewable energy, emissions trading, adaptation and catastrophe insurance, and the Sponge City program for resilient urban infrastructure. That structure allows the authors to show, rather than assert, where central authority is strong and where it is not.
This disaggregated approach speaks to a broader pattern now visible across Asian political economy: the gap between stated national climate targets and the fragmented reality of implementation at provincial and municipal levels. Chen's review highlights the book's finding that Chinese climate governance operates in a manner that is "fragmented and domain-specific" even within an authoritarian system — a conclusion that resonates with wider scholarship on China's decentralized administrative bargaining, where central mandates on carbon intensity or renewable deployment are filtered through local cadre evaluation systems, provincial fiscal incentives, and industry lobbying. The book's attention to concrete programs such as the national emissions trading scheme and the Sponge City initiative for flood-resilient urban design illustrates how market mechanisms and infrastructure investment are both instruments the state uses to manage decarbonization and risk simultaneously, rather than treating mitigation and adaptation as separate policy tracks. For researchers and observers of other large developing economies in Asia pursuing their own energy transitions, this empirical granularity offers a corrective to accounts that assume centralized political systems automatically produce coherent climate delivery.
The policy implications extend into how international actors, including development finance institutions and civil society organizations working on climate and environmental governance, should calibrate their expectations of Chinese engagement. If governance is genuinely fragmented and domain-specific, as the reviewed book argues, then external partners seeking to influence outcomes — whether through technical cooperation on emissions trading design, co-financing adaptation infrastructure comparable to the Sponge City model, or engaging with Chinese actors in multilateral climate negotiations — cannot rely on a single point of leverage at the central government level. Instead, effectiveness depends on understanding which specific institutional domain, and which combination of market incentive and administrative directive, governs a given sector. This has direct bearing on how organizations focused on ODA and civil society studies, including institutions like IOCSS, should read China's growing role as both a recipient-turned-donor and a competitor in green technology markets across the Global South: engagement strategies calibrated to an imagined unitary Chinese state risk missing the actual sites of negotiation and resistance that Lo and Xiang's case-by-case method surfaces.
Looking forward, the significance of this contribution for both practitioners and researchers lies less in any single empirical finding than in the analytical discipline it models. Chen's review credits the book with delivering "a careful and comprehensive engagement with both theory and empirical cases in China's climate governance," a balance that is often difficult to sustain in a field prone to either uncritical celebration of China's renewable energy scale-up or blanket skepticism about authoritarian governance. For scholars tracking the political economy of climate transitions across Asia, the task now is to test whether the fragmented, domain-specific pattern identified in Lo and Xiang's account of China holds in other centralized or semi-centralized developing economies, and whether instruments like emissions trading and resilience infrastructure travel as effectively as market mechanisms once decoupled from China's particular administrative architecture. For practitioners in development cooperation and civil society advocacy, the lesson is more immediate: durable partnerships with Chinese institutions on climate issues will require the same sectoral specificity the book itself employs, rather than assumptions drawn from the headline figure of China's emissions total or its position as the leading producer of renewable energy equipment.