Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-15
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases governs its own energy transition has never been more consequential. As the international community attempts to operationalize the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement and more recently affirmed through successive COP summits, China's domestic climate governance sits at the intersection of global environmental necessity and the deeply contested politics of development, sovereignty, and economic restructuring. For scholars of Asia's political economy, and for practitioners engaged in international development finance and climate-linked official development assistance, understanding the architecture of China's climate policy — its institutional logic, its market instruments, and the social tensions embedded in transition — is not a peripheral analytical concern but a central one. The article under review, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, addresses precisely this nexus, examining China's evolving climate governance through the interlocking lenses of policy transition, state-market relations, and the broader structural imperatives driving decarbonization in a developmental state context.
China's transition toward a lower-carbon economy has unfolded through a distinct governance model that departs significantly from the liberal market environmentalism that has dominated Western climate policy discourse. Rather than relying primarily on price signals or civil society pressure to drive decarbonization, the Chinese state has pursued a command-and-incentive hybrid: setting binding carbon intensity targets through Five-Year Plans, mandating renewable energy deployment through administrative directives, and simultaneously constructing market-oriented instruments such as the national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which became the world's largest carbon market by coverage when it launched its electricity sector pilot in 2021. The analytical significance of this dual-track approach lies in what it reveals about the Chinese party-state's capacity to sequence institutional innovations — deploying regulatory authority to establish the conditions under which market mechanisms can subsequently function. This is not market-led transition, nor is it purely state-directed; it is a form of developmental environmentalism in which the state retains the capacity to define the boundaries and pace of marketization while pursuing macroeconomic objectives simultaneously.
The governance dimension of China's climate policy cannot be disentangled from the broader question of center-local relations that has structured Chinese political economy for decades. Provincial and municipal governments have historically been both implementers of central mandates and autonomous economic actors with strong incentives to prioritize growth, employment, and industrial output over environmental targets. The record on local compliance with energy intensity targets and pollution standards has been uneven, and the emergence of the ETS introduces a new layer of complexity: local governments and state-owned enterprises must now navigate carbon accounting requirements and price exposure while managing their relationships with politically sensitive heavy industries. Research in this area consistently highlights the importance of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) infrastructure as a foundational prerequisite for carbon market integrity, and China's investment in building these administrative capacities represents one of the more underappreciated dimensions of its climate governance effort. The article's attention to governance mechanisms situates it within a growing body of scholarship that resists reducing China's climate trajectory to either triumphalist narratives of green technological leadership or skeptical accounts of greenwashing and regulatory capture.
From the vantage point of global political economy and international development, China's climate transition carries implications that extend well beyond its own borders. China remains the world's dominant financier of energy infrastructure in the Global South through mechanisms including the Belt and Road Initiative, the China Development Bank, and the Export-Import Bank of China. The internal policy debate within China over whether and how to green its overseas lending portfolios — spurred in part by G20 sustainable finance frameworks and in part by domestic reputational concerns — is inseparable from the question of how recipient countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America will themselves navigate energy transitions. ODA practitioners and development finance institutions operating in these regions must therefore understand China's domestic climate governance not merely as a subject of comparative policy analysis but as a determinant of the financing landscape for low-income and middle-income country energy systems. The interaction between China's domestic carbon pricing ambitions and its external development finance posture represents one of the most consequential, and least adequately studied, intersections in contemporary development finance.
The policy implications flowing from serious engagement with China's climate governance model are multiple and sometimes counterintuitive. For multilateral bodies and bilateral donors engaged in climate finance and capacity-building partnerships with China, the evidence that China's governance approach emphasizes administrative capacity-building alongside market instrument design suggests that technical assistance focused narrowly on price mechanisms may be insufficient. The co-evolution of regulatory authority and market function in the Chinese context implies that institutional sequencing matters enormously, and that lessons drawn from China's experience may be more transferable to other developmental state contexts — Vietnam, Ethiopia, Indonesia — than frameworks derived from OECD country experience. For researchers, the article's framing raises productive questions about how to theorize the relationship between authoritarian governance structures and environmental policy effectiveness, resisting both the assumption that democratic accountability is a necessary condition for ambitious climate action and the equally problematic assumption that centralized authority automatically translates into policy coherence on the ground.
Looking forward, the trajectory of China's climate governance will be shaped by at least three converging pressures that scholars and practitioners should track closely. First, the expansion of the ETS beyond the power sector to cover cement, steel, aluminum, and chemicals will stress-test the institutional infrastructure that has been painstakingly assembled and will generate political economy conflicts between carbon-exposed industries and the central government's decarbonization commitments. Second, the relationship between China's domestic transition and its international climate diplomacy — including its commitments under the Paris Agreement to peak emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 — will be subject to increasing scrutiny as the gap between announced targets and observed trajectories either narrows or widens in the years ahead. Third, the emergence of carbon border adjustment mechanisms in the European Union and potentially other jurisdictions introduces an external disciplinary pressure on Chinese industrial actors that could either accelerate domestic decarbonization or provoke defensive trade policy responses. For the scholarly community working on Asia's political economy, and for the development professionals whose work is increasingly shaped by climate conditionalities and green transition imperatives, the governance choices being made in Beijing today will reverberate through the global development landscape for decades.