Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-01
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
China's trajectory on climate change has become one of the most consequential variables in global environmental governance, a reality that no serious analysis of development, political economy, or multilateral cooperation can afford to ignore. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most prolific investor in renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a uniquely paradoxical position in the international climate order. The country accounts for roughly 30 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions while also installing more solar and wind capacity annually than the rest of the world combined. This tension — between industrial path dependency and green transformation ambition — is not merely a technical or environmental question. It is fundamentally a question of political economy, state capacity, and the contested governance of transition. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, takes up precisely this complexity by examining how China is navigating the intertwined challenges of climate transition, institutional governance, and market-based mechanisms in an era of deepening geopolitical uncertainty.
At the heart of this inquiry lies what scholars of comparative political economy have long identified as the "developmental state dilemma" in transition contexts: how does a state that has built its legitimacy substantially on high-growth, energy-intensive industrialization recalibrate both its material foundations and its ideological commitments toward a low-carbon future? China's case is distinctive because the transition is being driven not primarily by civil society pressure or electoral accountability — as has been more characteristic of European trajectories — but by a complex amalgam of state strategic planning, international reputational concerns, economic restructuring imperatives, and the perceived long-term risks of climate instability to domestic food and water security. The Chinese Communist Party's announcement of peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — the so-called "dual carbon" goals — represents an extraordinary commitment from a governance perspective, one that requires coordinating across levels of government, industrial sectors, and financial systems at a scale without clear historical precedent. The article appears to take seriously the institutional complexity of this undertaking, situating climate policy within the broader architecture of Chinese state governance rather than treating it as a technocratic add-on to existing development plans.
A central dimension of China's climate governance that warrants careful analytical attention is the emergence and expansion of the national carbon Emissions Trading System (ETS), launched at scale in 2021 and now constituting the world's largest carbon market by covered emissions. Market-based mechanisms occupy an ambivalent position in Chinese economic governance more broadly: they are embraced instrumentally when they serve strategic state objectives, but are subject to heavy administrative oversight and periodic intervention that distinguishes them from their counterparts in the European Union or California. The ETS in China has faced well-documented challenges, including weak price signals, generous initial allocations to energy-intensive industries, insufficient monitoring and verification infrastructure, and persistent tensions between central regulatory ambitions and local implementation capacities. These are not merely technical deficiencies; they reflect deeper governance tensions in a system where local governments retain significant discretionary authority over industrial regulation while simultaneously bearing responsibility for economic growth targets that may conflict with emissions reduction goals. Understanding how these contradictions are being managed — through bureaucratic restructuring, revised incentive systems, and periodic enforcement campaigns — is essential for any realistic assessment of whether China's market-based climate instruments can deliver meaningful decarbonization at the pace the dual carbon timeline requires.
The political economy of China's green transition also has profound implications for the international development landscape, particularly for how Official Development Assistance flows and green finance are being redefined in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. China has been the subject of extensive criticism for financing coal infrastructure in developing countries through policy banks and state-owned enterprises, and this criticism has shaped multilateral debates about what constitutes responsible development finance in the climate era. However, the picture is considerably more complex than the headline narrative suggests. China has in recent years signaled a pivot toward green Belt and Road financing, though the gap between stated policy and operational practice remains a subject of active contestation among researchers and civil society organizations. For ODA practitioners and development finance scholars, China's evolving approach raises fundamental questions about the standards, monitoring frameworks, and governance norms that should govern climate-aligned development finance in the Global South. The extent to which China's domestic climate governance innovations — including green bond standards, environmental impact assessment requirements, and the ETS framework — are being exported, adapted, or contested in recipient countries remains an underexplored dimension of this dynamic.
The research and policy significance of scholarly work on China's climate governance extends well beyond the China studies field. As multilateral climate diplomacy grapples with the adequacy of national commitments under the Paris Agreement framework and its successive global stocktakes, the credibility and ambition of Chinese climate policy carries systemic weight. A China that demonstrably accelerates its transition while sustaining economic development offers a model that middle-income and emerging economies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America will scrutinize closely. Conversely, a China that fails to align its coal retirement schedules, its industrial subsidies, and its overseas finance with the dual carbon timeline risks undermining the fragile consensus that has made incremental multilateral climate progress possible. For civil society organizations engaged in climate advocacy, the governance of China's transition raises difficult questions about access, voice, and influence in a political system where independent environmental NGOs operate under significant constraints, and where the most consequential policy deliberations occur within party-state structures that are largely opaque to outside scrutiny.
Looking forward, the study of China's climate policy sits at the intersection of some of the most urgent research agendas in contemporary social science: the political economy of green industrial transformation, the governance of state capitalism under ecological constraint, the dynamics of South-South development finance, and the evolving architecture of global climate cooperation. For practitioners in the ODA and development finance space, the coming years will require much closer engagement with China's domestic regulatory evolution — not as a peripheral concern, but as a central variable shaping the conditions under which climate finance, technology transfer, and capacity-building investments can be made effective in the developing world. For researchers affiliated with institutes like IOCSS, which situate civil society and political economy at the center of development analysis, China's climate transition offers a rich and consequential case study in how states manage the distributional conflicts, institutional inertia, and legitimacy demands that accompany large-scale structural transformation. The field will benefit enormously from continued rigorous, empirically grounded scholarship of the kind this article appears to contribute — work that refuses easy narratives and instead attends carefully to the contradictions, contingencies, and governance realities that will ultimately determine whether China's climate ambitions translate into durable emissions reductions.