New Report: Climate Change in China's Governance

June 17, 2024 — Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) has released Climate Change in China’s Governance: Agenda, Agents, and International Cooperation, authored by Guoguang Wu, CCA Senior Fellow on Chinese Politics. The report examines the officials and departments driving Beijing’s climate ambitions and assesses China’s progress, both domestically and internationally, in its fight against the climate crisis. 

“China’s leaders are motivated to pursue climate action primarily by politics, although the goals of reducing energy dependence, upgrading China’s development model to catch up with green technologies, improving the regime’s governance capacity, and supporting China’s global strategy and foreign conduct are also important,” writes Wu.

“Although official rhetoric on climate action has remained strong since the beginning of Xi Jinping’s third term, there are signs that China may be relaxing rather than strengthening its climate commitment,” says Wu. For example, “the appointment of professional diplomat Liu Zhenmin as China’s special envoy for climate change in early 2024 seems to indicate that Xi prioritizes climate diplomacy over substantive climate action.”

Furthermore, the “ultra-concentration of political power and fragmentation of governance under Xi and the Chinese Communist Party poses additional obstacles to China’s climate action over the next five years,” writes Wu. “Local authorities play a significant role in implementing climate strategy and policies, but they are tightly controlled by the Party-state leadership and the central government.” 

Other challenges to China’s climate action over the next five years will include the pressure to promote economic growth, declining government fiscal capacities, and the repression of environmental activism.

According to the report, China’s climate action in the near term will likely focus on:

• Achieving breakthroughs in green technology and green energy;
• Upgrading industrial production in heavy-polluting sectors, such as steel, cement, or coal;
• Setting up and improving policy and institutional schemes for facilitating progress toward low carbon goals;
• Promoting climate-related policy research and strengthening climate regulations and legislation;
• Relaxing the dual carbon goals requirement and tolerating localities that game the “low-quality peak” and manipulate the “peaking timeline”; and 
• Using China’s global climate engagement in climate action to benefit China and developing nations in terms of standard making, technology, and soft power.

Read the full report here.

The launch of Climate Change in China’s Governance includes a discussion about China’s climate agenda at Asia Society New York on Tuesday, June 18, at 9:00 a.m. (breakfast available at 8:30 a.m.). Guoguang Wu will be joined in conversation by Li Shuo, Senior Director of the ASPI Climate Hub, and Deborah Seligsohn, Senior Associate with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Villanova University. International climate change correspondent Somini Sengupta of The New York Times will moderate.

Members of the media interested in attending the launch event or in interviewing Guoguang Wu should contact [email protected].