Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-31
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how China navigates its climate commitments has become one of the defining political economy questions of the twenty-first century. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously one of the largest investors in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position in global climate governance. The urgency of this paradox has only intensified in the years following the Paris Agreement, as the gap between nationally determined contributions and the actual trajectory of emissions reduction has widened across much of the developing world. Against this backdrop, scholarly inquiry into the internal architecture of China's climate policy — its transition pathways, governance structures, and market-based mechanisms — is not merely of academic interest. It speaks directly to whether the global community can realistically expect the transformations necessary to limit warming to levels that avoid catastrophic disruption. Understanding how China's political economy shapes, accelerates, or constrains its climate ambitions is therefore essential for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners engaged with development, sustainability, and international cooperation alike.
China's approach to climate policy is inseparable from its broader model of state-directed economic governance. Unlike liberal market economies, where carbon pricing and market mechanisms operate within frameworks largely insulated from direct political intervention, China's climate governance is embedded within a system in which the party-state retains decisive authority over investment flows, industrial policy, and territorial administration. This structural feature generates both distinctive advantages and characteristic vulnerabilities. On the advantage side, China has demonstrated a capacity to mobilize resources at scale and speed that no market-led system has matched — its deployment of solar photovoltaic capacity, wind turbines, and electric vehicle manufacturing over the past decade stands as perhaps the most consequential industrial transformation in modern environmental history. Yet the same centralized governance architecture that enables rapid scaling also produces well-documented distortions: overcapacity in strategic sectors, misalignment between central targets and local implementation incentives, and the persistence of coal-dependent industries where regional employment and fiscal revenues remain entangled with fossil fuel production. Any rigorous analysis of China's climate policy must therefore hold in tension these simultaneous capacities for decisive action and structural resistance.
The market dimension of China's climate transition adds a further layer of complexity. The establishment of the national emissions trading scheme, launched in 2021 and covering the power sector as its initial phase, represents a landmark institutional development in Chinese environmental governance. Yet its design reflects the characteristic compromises of China's political economy: allowances have been allocated on the basis of intensity benchmarks rather than absolute caps, reducing the scheme's immediate stringency while preserving space for continued output growth. The evolution of this market will be a critical indicator of whether China's climate governance is genuinely tightening or whether market mechanisms are being deployed primarily as signals of international credibility rather than as drivers of domestic transformation. Scholarship examining this question must grapple with the multi-level governance dynamics that shape policy implementation — the divergent interests of provincial governments, state-owned enterprises, and private capital — as well as the ways in which China's carbon market interacts with, and may increasingly influence, emerging carbon border adjustment mechanisms in the European Union and elsewhere.
At the regional and global levels, China's climate trajectory carries implications that extend far beyond its own borders. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has become a principal source of infrastructure finance across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the energy composition of that finance — whether it flows toward coal, gas, or renewables — has outsized consequences for the emissions pathways of recipient countries. Recent years have seen meaningful shifts in this regard, with official commitments to cease financing overseas coal projects announced in 2021, though questions remain about the pace of transition and the extent to which development finance institutions are genuinely reorienting their portfolios. For scholars working in the tradition of ODA analysis and South-South cooperation research, China's climate finance represents a domain where the boundaries between geopolitical strategy, developmental ambition, and environmental obligation are actively contested. The governance frameworks through which this finance flows — or fails to flow — toward green transitions in partner countries are thus of direct relevance to the broader literature on aid effectiveness, conditionality, and the political economy of international development.
Looking forward, the trajectories established in Chinese climate policy over the coming decade will have consequences that outlast any single administration or five-year plan. The interplay between technological lock-in — particularly in the manufacturing ecosystems for solar, batteries, and electric vehicles where Chinese firms have achieved significant competitive advantages — and the governance reforms necessary to credibly deepen emissions reductions will shape not only China's own trajectory but the cost structure of clean energy transitions globally. Researchers and practitioners engaged with these questions would do well to resist both the temptation of uncritical optimism about China's green transformation and the reflexive skepticism that dismisses its achievements. The more productive analytical posture is one that takes seriously the genuine structural tensions within China's political economy, tracks the evolution of governance institutions and market mechanisms with empirical rigor, and situates Chinese climate policy within the broader architecture of global climate governance — including the multilateral frameworks, bilateral relationships, and civil society pressures that continue to shape what is politically possible. In a world where the adequacy of global climate ambition depends significantly on what happens within China's borders and beyond them through its international engagements, this kind of sustained, nuanced scholarly attention is not a luxury but a necessity.