Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-11
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate change policy, state governance, and market mechanisms has emerged as one of the most consequential arenas in contemporary global political economy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in China, whose dual identity as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and an increasingly assertive architect of global climate diplomacy renders its domestic policy trajectory a matter of international significance far beyond its borders. As the energy transition accelerates globally and as multilateral climate frameworks face renewed stress under shifting geopolitical conditions, understanding how China navigates the tension between authoritarian governance, market liberalization, and climate ambition becomes essential for scholars, policymakers, and development practitioners alike. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, enters this debate at a critical juncture, offering a systematic analysis of how China's climate governance is being restructured in response to both domestic economic pressures and external expectations under the Paris Agreement architecture.
China's climate policy trajectory is best understood not as a linear progression toward decarbonization but as a contested field of competing institutional logics. The central government has consistently framed climate action in the language of ecological civilization and green development, yet implementation has been mediated through a fragmented governance system in which local governments, state-owned enterprises, and newly empowered regulatory bodies operate with divergent incentives. This article's focus on "transition, governance, and market" as co-constitutive dimensions of climate policy captures precisely this complexity. The transition in question is not merely technological — from coal to renewables — but institutional, requiring a reconfiguration of planning authority, financial regulation, and market design. The governance dimension is particularly salient because China's party-state apparatus both enables rapid policy deployment and introduces rigidities that impede the adaptive flexibility that effective climate management demands. Mandatory carbon targets can be cascaded through administrative hierarchies with remarkable speed, yet the same hierarchical structure can generate perverse compliance behaviors, including statistical manipulation of energy data and strategic deferral of costly retrofits.
The development of China's national emissions trading scheme (ETS) is perhaps the most instructive case study in this regard. Launched initially for the power sector and subsequently expanded, the ETS represents an attempt to harness market price signals within a state-directed framework — a hybrid that fits uneasily with either classic command-and-control regulation or textbook cap-and-trade design. Analysts have observed persistent problems of over-allocation, weak price discovery, and compliance without genuine abatement, suggesting that the market mechanism remains subordinate to industrial policy considerations and GDP growth imperatives. The article's analytical contribution, as suggested by its framing, likely lies in theorizing this subordination not as a simple failure of market design but as a structural feature of China's developmental state model, where markets are deliberately embedded within political constraints that preserve room for macroeconomic stabilization and sectoral protection. For scholars of the political economy of development, this framing resonates with longstanding debates about whether East Asian state capitalism can be adapted for the demands of ecological transformation without fundamentally altering its institutional foundations.
Situating China's climate governance within broader regional and global trends reveals additional layers of significance. Across the Indo-Pacific, states are grappling with analogous tensions between growth imperatives and decarbonization commitments, often with far fewer administrative and financial resources than Beijing commands. China's model — state-led green investment coupled with selective market instruments — has become an influential template, particularly through its Belt and Road Initiative, which has historically channeled substantial financing toward fossil fuel infrastructure in recipient countries even as China's domestic renewable capacity expanded at record pace. This contradiction between domestic climate ambition and overseas energy finance has attracted increasing scrutiny from international civil society organizations and from ODA-providing countries seeking to align development finance with climate goals. A nuanced analysis of China's domestic governance framework thus has direct implications for understanding how Chinese financial institutions will respond to emerging international norms around green finance and climate-aligned development lending.
From a policy standpoint, the governance architecture examined in this article carries lessons that extend well beyond China's national context. For international development institutions seeking to support low-carbon transitions in emerging economies, the Chinese experience underscores the limits of technical assistance focused on market mechanism design in isolation from broader questions of institutional capacity, political economy, and the distribution of transition costs. The communities and workers embedded in carbon-intensive industries face adjustment burdens that, if unaddressed, generate political resistance capable of derailing or diluting ambitious climate commitments regardless of the sophistication of the regulatory framework. ODA strategies that treat climate governance as primarily a technical and financial challenge, rather than a political and social one, risk replicating at the international level the same gaps that have constrained China's own ETS from delivering its full abatement potential.
Looking forward, the scholarly and practitioner communities will need to develop more robust frameworks for evaluating the quality — not merely the existence — of climate governance institutions in major emitting states. China's forthcoming policy decisions regarding carbon market expansion to additional industrial sectors, the treatment of methane emissions from coal mines, and the pace of coal capacity retirement will serve as critical tests of whether the institutional structures analyzed in this article are capable of deepening ambition over time. As the 2030 nationally determined contribution deadline approaches and as international pressure for more stringent mid-century targets intensifies, the governance and market dimensions of China's climate policy will face demands that the current hybrid framework may be structurally ill-equipped to meet. Research that illuminates the political economy of this constraint, as the article in question appears to do, is not merely academically valuable — it is indispensable for any realistic assessment of whether global climate stabilization targets remain achievable within the timeframes that the science demands.