Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-17
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The question of how a major developing economy simultaneously pursues industrial growth, energy security, and climate commitments has rarely been more consequential than it is today, and nowhere is that tension more vividly expressed than in the People's Republic of China. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its second-largest economy, China occupies a structurally ambiguous position in global climate governance: it is both a leading driver of cumulative atmospheric carbon loading and, increasingly, the dominant global manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries. The scholarly analysis published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia under the title "China's Climate Policy: Transition, Governance, and Market" arrives at a moment when that ambiguity has deepened. China's dual carbon goals — achieving peak emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 — have been formally embedded in national planning, yet the mechanisms by which the state intends to reach those targets remain contested, opaque in parts, and deeply revealing of broader tensions within the Chinese political economy. Understanding how China is navigating this transition is not merely an academic exercise; it carries direct implications for multilateral climate negotiations, for ODA architecture in the Global South, and for the future shape of green industrial capitalism worldwide.
The analytical framework suggested by the article's title — transition, governance, and market — is itself a scholarly provocation. Each of these three terms carries considerable theoretical weight, and their conjunction in the Chinese context resists easy synthesis. The concept of energy transition has been developed largely within a Western political economy tradition that assumes a certain degree of market autonomy and civil society pressure as drivers of decarbonization. In China, by contrast, the state retains commanding authority over both the direction and pace of transition, deploying administrative targets, industrial policy instruments, and regulatory mandates to shape investment flows in ways that market signals alone would not produce. The National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and a layered structure of provincial implementation bodies collectively constitute a governance architecture that is at once powerful and fragmented. Research in this vein typically reveals that China's climate governance is characterized less by policy coherence than by competitive bureaucratic adaptation, where central directives cascade unevenly through subnational governments that face simultaneous pressure to maintain economic growth and reduce emissions intensity. The tension between developmental imperatives and ecological commitments is not merely rhetorical; it is institutionalized in the incentive structures facing local officials, creating what scholars have called a "dual mandate" problem with measurable consequences for policy implementation fidelity.
The market dimension of China's climate policy has attracted particular scholarly scrutiny in recent years, and for good reason. China launched its national Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2021, covering the power sector and representing the largest carbon market by volume in the world. Yet the scheme's design reflects choices that differ markedly from European or Californian cap-and-trade models: initial allocations were benchmarked rather than auctioned, price ceilings were introduced to limit volatility, and the scope of covered sectors was narrow at launch. These design features invite questions about whether the ETS is primarily a decarbonization instrument or a governance tool for managing the political economy of state-owned energy enterprises. Analysis in the Journal of Contemporary Asia tradition often situates such institutional choices within the broader literature on developmental states and late industrialization, asking whether carbon markets in a Leninist-capitalist hybrid system can be expected to function as theory predicts. The evidence suggests that market mechanisms in China operate not as autonomous price-discovery systems but as instruments of state industrial strategy, calibrated to achieve political objectives — including the protection of strategically important incumbents — alongside environmental ones. This reading has significant implications for how international climate finance and carbon market linkage discussions should be structured.
The article's significance extends well beyond China's borders, connecting to debates about green ODA, South-South cooperation, and the political economy of the Global South's energy transition. China's overseas energy investments through Belt and Road Initiative channels have undergone a notable discursive and, to some degree, operational shift toward "green BRI" commitments, with Chinese policy banks under pressure — from both international partners and domestic strategic calculations — to reduce coal financing abroad. Yet the analytical literature has been careful to distinguish between stated commitments and observable financial flows, noting that the greening of Chinese overseas development finance remains partial, contested, and subject to the same subnational and institutional fragmentation that characterizes domestic climate governance. For recipient countries in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, the implications are consequential: energy infrastructure financed by China will shape emissions trajectories for decades, and the governance modalities attached to that financing differ substantially from DAC-member ODA norms around environmental and social safeguards. Researchers working on climate-ODA linkages must therefore grapple with a world in which the largest bilateral development financier operates outside the OECD framework and exports governance models that reflect its own institutional logic.
For practitioners and researchers, the forward-looking implications of this body of scholarship are several. First, the trajectory of China's domestic carbon market will be a crucial test of whether hybrid state-market climate governance can deliver emissions reductions at scale, and scholars should resist premature conclusions in either direction; the political economy of ETS expansion to heavy industry sectors such as steel, cement, and chemicals will be particularly revealing. Second, as China's technology leadership in clean energy manufacturing deepens, the geopolitics of green industrialization will intensify, with implications for ODA debates about technology transfer, intellectual property, and the terms on which developing countries access decarbonization tools. Third, the governance dimensions of China's climate transition — particularly the role of civil society, transparency, and participatory mechanisms — remain underresearched relative to the market and policy literature, a gap that the Journal of Contemporary Asia is well positioned to address given its tradition of critical political economy analysis. China's climate policy is not simply a national story; it is one of the defining axes of twenty-first century global political economy, and the scholarly community's capacity to analyze it rigorously, with attention to both institutional complexity and structural power, has never been more important.