Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-29
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases governs its own energy transition has become one of the defining problems of contemporary global politics. China accounts for roughly 30 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and its policy choices ripple outward through supply chains, commodity markets, multilateral climate negotiations, and the foreign development assistance that Beijing extends across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At a moment when the international community is grappling with the adequacy of nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement framework, and when the credibility of net-zero pledges is increasingly scrutinized by investors, civil society organizations, and peer governments alike, the character of China's domestic climate governance is not merely a matter of internal administration. It is a structural variable in the global climate equation. An article appearing in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" addresses this nexus directly, examining how the Chinese state has sought to steer an economy of extraordinary scale and complexity through what amounts to one of the most ambitious energy and industrial transformations in modern history.
The analytical framework implied by the article's three-term formulation — transition, governance, and market — is itself theoretically significant. Each of the three concepts carries a distinct intellectual lineage. "Transition" draws on sociotechnical systems theory and the broader literature on energy transitions, which treats decarbonization not simply as a technological swap but as a transformation of interconnected institutions, infrastructure, and social practices. "Governance" locates the inquiry within comparative politics and public administration, focusing on how authority is distributed across levels of government, how bureaucratic agencies coordinate or compete, and how the state mediates between competing societal interests. "Market" introduces political economy considerations, recognizing that China's decarbonization strategy has placed heavy reliance on market instruments — most notably its national emissions trading scheme — even as the overarching direction of policy remains firmly steered by the party-state apparatus. By weaving these three analytical threads together, the article resists both the techno-optimist tendency to reduce climate action to a deployment problem and the state-centric tendency to treat Chinese policy as a monolithic top-down command. The reality is considerably more layered.
China's national emissions trading scheme, which became the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions when it expanded to the power sector in 2021, exemplifies the tensions that characterize the country's climate governance architecture. On paper, a carbon price signal is meant to incentivize firms to reduce emissions at least cost, allocating abatement effort efficiently across the economy. In practice, the scheme has faced persistent challenges: initial allocations were generous enough to limit price pressure on major emitters, data quality and third-party verification have been sources of scandal and institutional uncertainty, and the political economy of coal-dependent provincial economies continues to exert downward pressure on ambition. These are not simply technical imperfections awaiting administrative correction. They reflect deeper tensions between the central government's climate commitments and the economic interests of local governments, state-owned enterprises, and the communities dependent on fossil fuel industries. Understanding why China's carbon market functions as it does requires situating it within the broader governance landscape — including the incentive structures facing local officials, the organizational interests of the National Development and Reform Commission and its successor the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and the channels through which industrial lobbying reaches the policy process.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy also intersects with questions of civil society participation and information transparency that are directly relevant to the scholarly community centered on IOCSS's research agenda. Compared to analogous policy processes in OECD democracies, China's climate governance offers extremely limited space for independent advocacy organizations to contest regulatory decisions, challenge environmental impact assessments, or mobilize public pressure against recalcitrant industrial actors. What civil society engagement does exist tends to be channeled through state-sanctioned bodies or international partnerships that carry their own political constraints. This matters for the quality of policy outcomes: robust civil society engagement has been identified across multiple national contexts as a driver of more ambitious, better-monitored, and more equitable climate policy. Its relative absence in China raises questions not only about procedural legitimacy but about the long-term durability and effectiveness of a climate transition premised on administrative capacity rather than broad societal ownership. These questions also have implications for the international climate diplomacy context, where China's interlocutors must assess the reliability and resilience of commitments made by a political system in which policy direction can shift with changes in elite priorities.
Beyond the domestic arena, China's climate policy choices have profound implications for the Global South countries that are simultaneously recipients of Chinese development finance, partners in Belt and Road infrastructure construction, and increasingly vocal participants in international climate negotiations. Beijing's overseas coal financing drew sustained criticism from development scholars and civil society organizations through the early 2020s, and the 2021 commitment by President Xi Jinping to cease financing new coal plants abroad represented a significant if incompletely implemented shift. The subsequent expansion of Chinese overseas investment in renewable energy — solar panels, wind installations, electric vehicle supply chains, and grid infrastructure — creates new dependencies and new opportunities for developing countries seeking to leapfrog fossil-fuel-intensive development pathways. How these flows of finance and technology interact with recipient-country governance capacity, labor standards, environmental regulation, and debt sustainability is a research frontier of considerable policy relevance. The analytical tools developed in the context of traditional ODA — attention to conditionality, institutional capacity, local ownership, and developmental effectiveness — must be adapted to make sense of Chinese climate-related development finance, which operates through different institutional channels and under different political logics.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by several intersecting forces that researchers and practitioners would do well to track carefully. Domestic economic pressures — including the structural slowdown following the property sector crisis, the imperatives of technological competition with the United States and Europe, and the political economy of managing employment in industrial transition zones — will continue to create friction between climate ambition and short-term economic management. At the same time, the rapid cost reductions achieved in Chinese solar manufacturing and battery production have created genuine economic interests aligned with decarbonization, suggesting that the political coalition in support of clean energy is not simply the product of top-down mandate but reflects real market dynamics. The interplay between these forces will determine whether China's 2060 carbon neutrality target is approached with the institutional seriousness that the timeline demands or whether it remains a long-horizon aspiration whose near-term operational implications are systematically softened by competing pressures. For the international research community, close attention to the governance mechanisms — the bureaucratic reorganizations, the regulatory experiments in pilot provinces, the evolution of the carbon market's design parameters — will be essential to distinguishing genuine transition momentum from what might otherwise appear, at the level of headline announcements, as forward movement. The stakes of getting this analytical judgment right extend well beyond the borders of China itself.