Revisiting China’s climate policy

When encountered the emergence of the multilateral climate governance, China showed hostile stance, opposing against have obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, it has gradually changed the stance to accept a non-obligatory reduction of carbon intensity, and to be proactive in the reduction. Meantime, it has implemented a number of climate policy measures. Against this backdrop, this chapter aims to explore what changed its hostile stance toward proactive one through a revisit to the policy process and policy outcomes that the Chinese government has taken to address the climate-energy conundrum, discussing the effectiveness of the policy outcome and logical consequences that will cause by enhancing the outcome. The findings can be summarized as follows. First, China’s climate policy has been centered on energy development strategy, thus framed as energy policy. However, detailed policy measures have been adjusted to incorporate vested interests of local governments and national oil companies (NOCs), government desire to create new growth point, and emerging heath concerns into account to make it realistic and effective. Second, the resultant climate-energy policy provokes conflicts of interests among provincial governments, NOCs and distributed energy producers, which blocks changes in energy mix from accelerating, and impairing the structural effect in CO 2 emission reduction. Such domestic conflicts of interests is shifting the government focus toward “going global” of coal and hydropower industries, which can cause international disruption of livelihood and ecology, and directs the energy infrastructure system of foreign countries toward a high CO 2 emission pathway.