Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-10
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The publication of this analysis in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when China's role in global climate governance has become one of the most consequential and contested questions in international political economy. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, responsible for roughly 30 percent of annual global carbon output, China's domestic policy choices reverberate far beyond its borders, shaping the trajectory of multilateral climate negotiations, influencing the investment calculations of development finance institutions, and defining the terms on which the energy transition unfolds across the Global South. The intersection of climate ambition, state governance architecture, and market mechanism design that this article engages is not merely a technical policy puzzle — it is, at its core, a question about the compatibility of authoritarian developmentalism with the structural demands of decarbonization, and about whether the Chinese model can serve as a template, a cautionary tale, or something irreducibly sui generis for other late-industrializing states navigating the same pressure.
China's climate governance framework has evolved through several distinct phases that illuminate the broader tensions the article appears to engage. The early period of engagement with international climate institutions, roughly from the late 1990s through the Copenhagen negotiations of 2009, was characterized by a posture of conditional participation, in which China defended its status as a developing nation entitled to prioritize economic growth while resisting binding emissions commitments. The pivot that followed, culminating in the Nationally Determined Contributions submitted under the Paris Agreement and the landmark 2020 announcement by President Xi Jinping of a 2060 carbon neutrality target with peak emissions by 2030, represented a qualitative transformation in the official framing of climate policy — one that repositioned decarbonization not as an externally imposed constraint but as a constitutive element of national development strategy. This reframing has critical implications for the governance architecture that the article examines, because it altered the bureaucratic politics surrounding climate institutions, elevated the salience of the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in inter-agency competition, and created new legitimacy resources for market-based instruments that had previously been viewed with suspicion in a planning-oriented system.
The market dimension of China's climate governance is perhaps where the analytical stakes are highest and where the contribution of a journal article focused on this nexus becomes most significant. China launched its national Emissions Trading Scheme in 2021, initially covering only the power sector but designed for eventual expansion to cover the eight highest-emitting industries, making it by coverage the largest carbon market in the world. The design of this system reflects deep tensions between the imperatives of market efficiency — which require credible price signals, transparent monitoring and verification, and enforcement capacity — and the structural features of Chinese political economy, including the dominance of state-owned enterprises in the covered sectors, the fragmentation of regulatory authority across central and provincial levels, and the political sensitivity of energy price increases in a system where social stability is a paramount governance concern. Early assessments of the scheme have noted that carbon prices have remained low by international comparison, that allocation methodologies have been generous toward incumbent emitters, and that data integrity has been compromised by falsification at the facility level — all of which suggest that the formal adoption of market instruments does not automatically produce the disciplining effects those instruments are designed to create. Understanding how China is navigating these contradictions, and what governance innovations have been attempted to address them, is precisely the kind of question that applied scholarship in this area must pursue.
The broader regional and international implications of China's climate policy trajectory deserve sustained analytical attention, particularly for scholars working within the ODA and development finance community. China's overseas infrastructure investment through the Belt and Road Initiative has historically included significant coal and fossil fuel components, creating a sharp tension between its domestic decarbonization narrative and its external development finance posture. Pressure from international civil society, multilateral development banks, and recipient country governments, combined with the declining cost competitiveness of fossil fuel projects and growing sovereign debt concerns among borrowing states, has produced a rhetorical shift toward green BRI commitments. Whether this shift is substantive or cosmetic, and what governance mechanisms exist to enforce green standards in Chinese overseas project finance, remains an area of active empirical contestation. For development scholars and ODA practitioners, the answer to this question has direct implications for programming, conditionality design, and the architecture of climate finance blending in low- and middle-income countries where Chinese and Western development finance increasingly operate in competitive or parallel channels.
From a policy standpoint, the insights this article contributes carry significance for several overlapping communities of practice. For Chinese policymakers and the research institutes that advise them, comparative analysis of how market mechanisms have been institutionalized in other governance contexts — the European Union's ETS, California's cap-and-trade program, South Korea's national carbon market — offers both cautionary lessons about implementation pathologies and constructive models for regulatory design. For international climate negotiators and the secretariats of multilateral environmental agreements, a granular understanding of the domestic political constraints that shape China's negotiating positions is essential for designing cooperative frameworks that are ambitious enough to matter yet politically feasible enough to sustain. For civil society organizations working on environmental governance in China and in countries receiving Chinese development finance, the article's examination of how market and state interact in climate governance provides analytical tools for identifying where advocacy pressure is most likely to produce institutional change and where structural constraints make reform unlikely without prior shifts in political economy.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by several variables that scholarship in this area must continue to track. The geopolitical deterioration of US-China relations has complicated the bilateral climate cooperation that had produced significant momentum under the Obama-era period, and while the dedicated climate diplomatic track has shown some resilience, the broader context of technological competition, trade restrictions, and strategic rivalry creates structural headwinds for the collaborative frameworks that ambitious climate action requires. Domestically, the tension between Xi Jinping's centralization of authority and the implementation capacity of subnational governments and market actors will continue to define whether China's formal climate commitments translate into measurable emissions reductions. The integration of climate considerations into China's financial regulatory architecture — through green finance standards, climate stress testing of the banking system, and carbon risk disclosure requirements — represents an emerging frontier where governance innovation is occurring at pace. For researchers affiliated with institutions like IOCSS that maintain a sustained focus on the interface between development, governance, and political economy, China's climate policy experiment offers a uniquely rich site of inquiry — one that challenges inherited assumptions about the necessary relationship between market liberalization, democratic governance, and effective environmental regulation, and that will continue to generate both analytical puzzles and practical lessons for decades to come.