Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-19
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: china, governance, policy, transition
The intersection of climate politics, state governance, and market development in China represents one of the most consequential dynamics in contemporary global affairs. As the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases and simultaneously its most ambitious deployer of renewable energy infrastructure, China occupies a paradoxical position at the center of international climate negotiations and domestic political economy alike. The publication of this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when scholars, policymakers, and development practitioners are urgently seeking to understand how China's internal governance architecture shapes not only its own trajectory toward decarbonization but also the broader contours of the global energy transition. The stakes are substantial: whether China achieves its dual carbon targets — peaking emissions by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060 — will determine, in large part, whether the Paris Agreement's goals remain scientifically attainable. That a leading journal of Asian political economy has devoted scholarly attention to this nexus of transition, governance, and market reflects the growing recognition that climate policy in China cannot be understood through a single disciplinary lens.
The analytical framework suggested by the article's title — situating climate policy at the convergence of systemic transition, governance structure, and market mechanism — offers a theoretically productive departure from both technocratic and purely geopolitical accounts of China's environmental turn. China's climate governance has evolved significantly since the early 2000s, when environmental commitments were largely subordinated to growth imperatives and treated as externalities to be managed at the margins of economic planning. The period following the 2015 Paris Agreement witnessed a qualitative shift: climate targets were embedded within Five-Year Plans, ministerial responsibilities were reorganized under the newly constituted Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and the national emissions trading system (ETS) — the world's largest by covered emissions volume — was formally launched in 2021. Each of these institutional developments reflects a deliberate effort by central authorities to translate political commitments into governable administrative structures. Yet governance in China is rarely a linear transmission from central directive to local outcome. The article's focus on the governance dimension likely interrogates the persistent tensions between national targets and subnational implementation, between the technocratic ambitions of climate bureaucracies and the investment preferences of provincial governments still dependent on coal-linked revenues and employment.
The market dimension of the article's analysis speaks to one of the most contested questions in the political economy of Chinese environmental governance: whether the state-led introduction of carbon pricing instruments represents a genuine embrace of market logic or a selective deployment of market rhetoric in service of planning objectives. China's national ETS, covering the power generation sector and gradually expanding to cover other high-emitting industries, has been praised by some analysts as a pragmatic and scalable instrument for incentivizing emissions reductions without mandating specific technologies. Critics, however, point to the relatively low carbon price levels, the dominance of free allowances over auctioned permits, and the weak enforcement mechanisms that have historically characterized Chinese regulatory practice. This tension — between market design and political accommodation — is not unique to China. Similar dynamics have played out in the European Union's carbon market and in various regional trading schemes across the Asia-Pacific. What distinguishes the Chinese case is the degree to which market instruments are deliberately nested within, rather than substituted for, state planning hierarchies. The political economy literature emerging from this observation raises important questions about the extent to which Western-derived theories of environmental governance, which frequently presuppose a separation between state and market actors, can adequately capture the institutional logic of Chinese climate policy.
From the perspective of development studies and ODA research, China's climate transition carries implications that extend well beyond its borders. As a major provider of development finance through the Belt and Road Initiative and bilateral lending arrangements, China's domestic energy transition policies have significant upstream effects on the kinds of infrastructure projects it finances in partner countries across South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. The Chinese government's 2021 commitment to cease financing overseas coal-fired power plants, while welcomed by climate advocates, has also intensified debates about the alternatives being offered in its place and the conditionality frameworks attached to green finance instruments. Civil society organizations in recipient countries have increasingly engaged with questions about transparency, environmental impact assessment, and community consultation in Chinese-financed infrastructure — raising governance concerns that parallel those the article likely addresses in the domestic Chinese context. International research institutions, including development-focused observatories, have a particular interest in tracking whether China's domestic governance reforms in the climate space translate into more accountable and environmentally rigorous development financing practices abroad, or whether the two remain largely decoupled.
Looking forward, the scholarly and policy significance of research on China's climate transition will only deepen as the 2030 emissions peak target approaches. The next four years represent a critical window during which the credibility of China's climate governance architecture will be tested in concrete terms: whether industrial restructuring proceeds at a pace consistent with decarbonization trajectories, whether the ETS develops the price signal robustness necessary to drive investment decisions, and whether provincial authorities develop the administrative capacity to monitor, report, and verify emissions in ways that can withstand international scrutiny. Researchers working in the Journal of Contemporary Asia tradition bring a distinctive set of analytical resources to these questions — an attentiveness to the political economy of state-society relations, a comparative sensitivity to how Asian developmental states have historically managed the relationship between growth and regulation, and a willingness to engage critically with dominant paradigms in global governance discourse. For practitioners in development agencies, civil society networks, and multilateral institutions, the implications are equally pressing: understanding how China governs its own climate transition is indispensable for designing credible international frameworks, calibrating diplomatic engagement, and supporting the capacity of civil society actors in countries most exposed to both the effects of climate change and the footprint of Chinese development finance. This article contributes to a body of scholarship that is not merely descriptive of an emerging reality but constitutive of the analytical vocabulary through which that reality will be understood and, ultimately, acted upon.