Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-12
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The urgency of global climate action has never been more politically complex than it is today. As international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement continue to shape national commitments, attention has increasingly turned to China — the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and, simultaneously, one of its most ambitious investors in renewable energy infrastructure. China's role in the global climate order is not merely a technical or environmental question; it is a deeply political one, implicating governance structures, developmental ideologies, and the architecture of state-market relations within one of the most consequential economies of the twenty-first century. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" engages precisely this terrain, situating China's evolving climate commitments within the contested dynamics of political transition, institutional governance, and the emergence of market mechanisms as instruments of environmental statecraft. At a moment when the credibility of multilateral climate governance is under sustained pressure from geopolitical fragmentation, China's domestic climate policy trajectory carries implications well beyond its own borders.
At the heart of this scholarly intervention is the recognition that China's climate policy cannot be understood in isolation from its broader model of developmental governance. The Chinese state has historically approached environmental policy through a logic of centralized planning modulated by periodic experimentation at the provincial and local levels — a system sometimes described as "fragmented authoritarianism." What makes the current conjuncture distinctive is the degree to which the Chinese government has moved to institutionalize climate commitments not merely as aspirational targets but as binding governance frameworks integrated into national planning cycles. China's dual carbon goals — carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 — represent a qualitative shift in the ambition and internal legitimacy of climate governance. The article's focus on transition, governance, and market as three interconnected axes of analysis reflects a sophisticated understanding that these goals cannot be achieved through administrative fiat alone; they require the construction of new institutional architectures that coordinate state actors, market participants, and subnational governments in fundamentally new ways.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy deserves particular analytic attention. One of the enduring tensions in China's environmental governance has been the gap between central policy ambition and local implementation, a gap produced by misaligned incentive structures that historically rewarded local officials for GDP growth rather than environmental compliance. Efforts to restructure these incentive systems — including the incorporation of environmental performance indicators into cadre evaluation frameworks — represent a serious institutional effort to close this implementation deficit. At the same time, the expansion of regulatory agencies with environmental mandates, and the elevation of climate-related portfolios within the bureaucratic hierarchy, signals a reorganization of state capacity in line with the demands of a low-carbon transition. The article's engagement with governance thus illuminates not just the formal architecture of climate policy but the deeper question of whether the Chinese developmental state is undergoing a substantive transformation in its organizational priorities and its relationship to environmental sustainability as a political value.
The market dimension of the analysis is equally significant. China has made substantial investments in market-based instruments for climate policy, most notably through the establishment of a national emissions trading scheme — the world's largest by coverage in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The trajectory of China's carbon market, from regional pilots initiated in 2011 to the national scheme launched in 2021, represents a significant experiment in applying market logics to environmental governance within a state-directed economy. This is not without its contradictions. Critics have noted that the initial scope of the national ETS, which covered only the power sector, limited its price discovery capacity and its effectiveness as a decarbonization signal across the broader economy. Debates about carbon pricing credibility, market liquidity, and the role of free versus auctioned allowances reveal the ongoing tensions between market mechanism design and the political economy of industrial interests. The journal article's framing of market as a governance tool rather than as an autonomous domain of allocation reflects a theoretically mature position that neither celebrates nor dismisses market instruments but situates them within the political and institutional context that shapes their actual operation.
Connecting China's climate policy to broader regional and global trends reveals additional layers of significance. In the context of Belt and Road Initiative financing, China's domestic climate commitments carry implications for the environmental standards applied to overseas infrastructure investment, a question that has attracted sustained attention from development scholars and civil society organizations concerned with ODA accountability. The greening of BRI — or its inadequacy — is a direct extension of the governance and market questions the article addresses domestically. At the same time, China's positioning within international climate negotiations, including its complex relationships with the G77 and with developed economies over questions of climate finance and historical responsibility, shapes the multilateral environment within which all national climate commitments are evaluated. For scholars of Asian political economy, China's case is not sui generis but rather an extreme expression of developmental state dynamics that have shaped climate governance across the region, from South Korea's Green New Deal to Vietnam's just energy transition partnerships.
The policy implications of this analysis are substantial. For international development organizations and bilateral donors, understanding the institutional logic of China's climate governance is essential for designing engagement strategies that can meaningfully interface with Chinese counterparts on technology transfer, capacity building, and financing architecture. For civil society organizations working on climate accountability, the article's attention to governance mechanisms highlights both the leverage points within the Chinese system where civil society engagement — however constrained — may influence outcomes, and the limits imposed by the political context within which that engagement occurs. For researchers, the article contributes to ongoing theoretical debates about the relationship between authoritarian governance and environmental sustainability, pushing back against both the pessimistic view that authoritarian systems are structurally incapable of effective climate action and the technocratic optimism that sees authoritarianism's decisiveness as an asset for rapid green transition. The reality, as the article suggests, is more institutionally specific and more politically contingent than either framing allows. Looking forward, the question of whether China's climate governance model will converge toward or diverge from the pluralist, civil-society-embedded models prominent in OECD contexts remains open — and the answer will shape not only China's own emissions trajectory but the broader viability of global climate cooperation in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition.