Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-30
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The urgency of global climate action has placed China's environmental governance at the center of international scholarly and policy debate. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its largest producer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a uniquely contradictory position in the architecture of global climate politics. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a moment of heightened scrutiny — when international stakeholders are assessing whether China's domestic climate commitments are genuinely transformative or strategically calibrated to serve industrial and geopolitical interests. The timing is significant: China has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, goals that, if realized, would reshape global emissions trajectories in ways no other single-nation commitment could. Understanding how China navigates the intersection of energy transition, state governance, and market-based mechanisms is therefore not merely an academic exercise but a question of fundamental consequence for the future of multilateral climate cooperation.
The analytical core of this work centers on three interrelated dimensions — transition, governance, and market — that together constitute the architecture of China's climate policy response. The transition dimension refers to the structural economic and energetic shift away from coal dependency toward a diversified, lower-carbon energy mix. China's rapid scaling of solar photovoltaic capacity, wind energy installations, and electric vehicle manufacturing has drawn global attention and, in some quarters, admiration. However, the pace and character of this transition are deeply uneven across regions and sectors. Provinces in the northeast and interior, whose economic foundations remain embedded in heavy industry and coal extraction, have resisted or delayed decarbonization pressures that would impose severe local economic costs. The tension between national transition ambitions and subnational political economy thus emerges as a structurally defining challenge — one that any serious analysis of China's climate trajectory must confront. The article's framing around "transition" appears to capture this dialectical quality: change is real, measurable, and in some respects remarkable, but it is also contested, partial, and subject to reversal under conditions of energy price volatility or growth pressure.
On the question of governance, the analytical stakes are equally high. China's climate governance operates through a layered and often poorly coordinated system in which central directives interact — sometimes productively, sometimes dysfunctionally — with provincial implementation capacities and incentive structures. The central government, particularly through the National Development and Reform Commission and, more recently, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, has increasingly asserted control over climate target-setting and reporting frameworks. Yet local governments retain substantial discretion over land use, industrial permitting, and infrastructure investment decisions that directly determine emissions outcomes. This vertical fragmentation produces what scholars of Chinese political economy have long described as "selective compliance" — local actors signal alignment with national priorities while preserving the developmental prerogatives that sustain local fiscal health and employment. An analysis centered on governance must therefore engage with these principal-agent dynamics carefully, resisting both the tendency to treat central policy announcements as operational realities and the opposite tendency to dismiss stated commitments as purely rhetorical.
The market dimension introduces a third axis of analytical complexity. China's national emissions trading scheme, launched nationally in 2021 after years of regional piloting, represents the world's largest carbon market by volume of covered emissions. Its design, however, has been criticized for structural weaknesses: allowances have been allocated on the basis of intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps, the coverage has initially been limited to the power sector, and enforcement mechanisms remain underdeveloped. The article's attention to market mechanisms within the broader governance and transition framework is valuable precisely because it situates market instruments not as technocratic solutions operating in isolation but as politically constituted tools whose effectiveness depends entirely on the regulatory and institutional environment in which they are embedded. The experience of European carbon markets offers a sobering comparative lesson: even in contexts with stronger regulatory traditions and higher administrative capacity, carbon price signals have required sustained political insulation from lobbying pressure to generate meaningful decarbonization outcomes. In China's case, where the state retains profound influence over both energy sector actors and the market infrastructure itself, the question of whether market mechanisms can generate genuine incentives — rather than simply providing a performance of marketized governance — remains empirically open.
From a broader regional and global perspective, China's climate policy trajectory carries implications that extend well beyond its borders. China's Belt and Road Initiative has continued, despite some reorientation toward "green" standards, to finance carbon-intensive infrastructure in recipient countries across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The credibility of China's domestic climate commitments is therefore inseparable from its external development finance posture. Development scholars and ODA practitioners have increasingly recognized that Chinese overseas financing, whether channeled through policy banks or multilateral vehicles, constitutes an important variable in the emissions trajectories of developing nations. A China that successfully manages its domestic energy transition while simultaneously constraining high-carbon lending abroad would represent a qualitatively different global actor than one whose green domestic rhetoric is contradicted by brown external behavior. Research of the kind represented by this Journal of Contemporary Asia article contributes to the evidential and conceptual foundation needed to assess which trajectory is actually unfolding.
For policymakers, researchers, and civil society practitioners engaged with global climate governance, several implications follow. First, the governance architecture through which China implements its climate commitments should be understood as a site of genuine political contestation, not a unitary expression of state will. This means that external pressure, international reporting frameworks, and bilateral diplomatic engagement can have traction — not because China is susceptible to normative suasion in a simple sense, but because international commitments create domestic accountability resources that progressive actors within the Chinese system can deploy. Second, the design of market mechanisms matters enormously, and international cooperation on carbon market methodology, MRV standards, and allowance allocation principles offers a potentially productive channel for engagement. Third, the linkage between China's domestic climate governance and its external development finance behavior must be treated as analytically integrated, not as separate research domains. As multilateral development banks and bilateral ODA donors recalibrate their climate conditionality frameworks, understanding how China's internal governance dynamics shape its external posture becomes an increasingly practical research priority, not merely a scholarly one. The work represented by this article thus contributes not only to the literature on comparative climate politics but to the broader intellectual infrastructure that practitioners and policymakers need to navigate an era in which China's role in global governance is simultaneously indispensable and deeply uncertain.