Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-14
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate change mitigation and political economy has emerged as one of the defining analytical frontiers of contemporary development studies. For a country of China's scale — responsible for approximately 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously the world's largest investor in renewable energy — climate policy is not simply an environmental concern but a structural feature of how the state governs economic transformation. Against this backdrop, the Journal of Contemporary Asia's publication of "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a consequential moment, as the international community grapples with the widening gap between Paris Agreement commitments and measurable progress. Understanding how China navigates the triple challenge of decarbonizing a fossil-fuel-intensive industrial economy, maintaining political legitimacy through continued growth, and positioning itself as a global leader in green finance and clean technology requires the kind of integrated political economy analysis that this article appears to offer. For scholars working at the intersection of development, ODA, and civil society, China's experience represents not merely a national case study but a template — contested and instructive — for how emerging and middle-income economies may pursue climate governance under structural constraints.
The framing around "transition, governance, and market" in the article's subtitle signals a tripartite analytical architecture that is worth examining carefully. The concept of transition in Chinese climate policy discourse refers not only to the energy transition — from coal to renewables — but to a broader developmental transition in which the state reconfigures economic incentives, industrial policy instruments, and territorial governance to align with carbon neutrality goals. China's dual carbon targets, announced in 2020 and reaffirmed at successive party congresses, commit the country to peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. These are not modest commitments for a country where coal still provides roughly 55 percent of electricity generation, where heavy industry remains foundational to subnational fiscal revenue, and where provincial governments retain substantial autonomy over energy investment decisions. The governance dimension is therefore central: how does the central state coordinate, enforce, and incentivize compliance with decarbonization mandates across a heterogeneous set of provincial actors with divergent interests? The market dimension adds a further layer of complexity, as China has constructed what is now the world's largest carbon emissions trading system (ETS), a market-based mechanism that in theory allows cost-effective abatement while preserving enterprise flexibility. The analytical challenge the article appears to take up — how these three dimensions interact and sometimes conflict — is precisely where the most important political economy questions reside.
The governance of China's climate transition is inseparable from the broader architecture of Chinese state power and its characteristic tensions. The central government issues ambitious targets and regulatory frameworks, but implementation depends on provincial and local officials whose career incentives, historically tied to GDP growth metrics, may not align seamlessly with carbon reduction priorities. Scholars of Chinese political economy have long documented the principal-agent problems that pervade Beijing's efforts to translate central directives into local action, and the climate domain is no exception. The phased expansion of the national ETS — beginning with the power sector and intended to eventually cover eight major industrial sectors — reflects both the ambition and the caution of a governance system that must balance transformation with stability. The reliance on market mechanisms such as carbon pricing is itself a governance choice with ideological and institutional dimensions: it represents the continued penetration of market logic into domains previously governed through command-and-control instruments, while simultaneously requiring the state to build and maintain the regulatory infrastructure — monitoring, reporting, verification — that functional carbon markets presuppose. How effectively China has built that infrastructure, and where the institutional gaps remain, is a question with direct implications for the credibility of its climate commitments.
For scholars and practitioners engaged with official development assistance and South-South cooperation, China's climate policy trajectory has significant spillover effects that extend well beyond its domestic borders. China is a major financier of infrastructure across the Global South through the Belt and Road Initiative, and the carbon intensity of that financing has been a persistent source of international concern. The announced phaseout of overseas coal financing in 2021 was a notable policy shift, but its implementation and the degree to which it has been replaced by genuinely green alternatives remains contested. China's climate governance model — characterized by strong state direction, market instrument deployment, and relatively limited independent civil society participation — also carries implicit lessons for recipient countries seeking to develop their own climate governance frameworks. The question of whether market-based mechanisms like carbon trading can function in institutional environments weaker than China's, and whether civil society exclusion from climate governance processes undermines the social sustainability of the energy transition, are questions that development researchers and ODA practitioners must engage with directly. The article's analysis of how governance and market mechanisms interact in China's own experience can thus serve as a reference point for comparative work across the Global South.
The policy significance of rigorous scholarship on China's climate governance extends into multiple registers simultaneously. At the multilateral level, China's domestic policy credibility directly affects the dynamics of international climate negotiations: the degree to which other major emitters trust Chinese commitments shapes the ambition level of collective agreements. At the bilateral and regional level, China's climate technology exports — solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles — are reshaping energy markets from Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, with governance implications for technology dependency, local industrial policy, and the distribution of green transition gains. At the analytical level, the question of whether China's state-led, market-assisted model of climate governance constitutes a viable paradigm or a set of contingent arrangements suited only to China's particular institutional configuration has broad theoretical stakes. Research published in journals like the Journal of Contemporary Asia, which brings political economy rigor to the study of Asian development, plays an important role in adjudicating these questions by subjecting policy narratives to systematic empirical scrutiny.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate policy will be shaped by several converging pressures whose interaction remains uncertain. The economic headwinds China has faced since 2022 — including property sector stress, subdued domestic consumption, and geopolitical trade friction — create fiscal pressures that may complicate the financing of green transition investments, particularly at the subnational level. At the same time, China's competitive position in clean energy manufacturing has strengthened considerably, creating economic interests that may reinforce decarbonization commitments even as other pressures push against them. The evolution of the national ETS, whose carbon price has been criticized as too low to drive meaningful abatement decisions, will be a key indicator of whether market mechanisms deepen or remain largely ceremonial instruments. For civil society researchers in particular, the question of how environmental NGOs, community groups, and expert networks participate in — or are excluded from — the governance of the climate transition will remain pressing, given evidence that participatory governance tends to improve both the quality and the legitimacy of major policy transitions. The article under review contributes to a cumulative scholarly record that practitioners at ODA institutions, bilateral development agencies, and multilateral climate funds would do well to engage with carefully, as they navigate the challenge of supporting climate action in a world shaped, in no small part, by the choices China makes.