In a historic shift, China’s CO₂ emissions are falling. This is not due to an economic slump, but rather an aggressive pivot toward clean energy. As the world’s largest emitter, China’s transformation is more than symbolic: It has the potential to redefine the pace and politics of global climate action. This turning point demands closer scrutiny.
By Ceren Çevik
In 2020, Beijing unveiled its “double-carbon” (双碳) policy, framing it as a pivot toward climate leadership and signaling that the world’s largest emitter was finally stepping up to its long-anticipated global responsibilities. Since then, China has massively expanded its clean energy capacity and launched a national emissions trading scheme. Yet coal still looms large, and the pace of actual emission reductions has been inconsistent. Now, with emissions finally beginning to decline, a crucial question resurfaces: Is the “double-carbon” agenda engendering genuine structural transformation, or is China simply mastering the optics of climate leadership without fundamentally rewriting its carbon playbook?
What in the World is “Double-Carbon Policy”?
The “Double-Carbon” Policy, known domestically as shuāng tàn or double-carbon (双碳), stands for two key targets: peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. First announced by President Xi Jinping at the United Nations General Assembly in 2020, the policy marked a turning point in China’s approach to global climate governance. Yet “double-carbon” did not emerge in a vacuum. It builds on two decades of gradual environmental policy reform, from Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Outlook on Development” to the more recent push for “ecological civilization.”
In many ways, double-carbon agenda represents both continuity and rupture: It extends China’s tradition of state-led planning, especially in environmental governance, while also reframing climate action as integral to the broader national rejuvenation, the Chinese Communist Party’s vision of restoring the country’s strength, prosperity, and global standing. When first announced, the policy was met with skepticism from both the public and scientific communities. Its ambiguity was no accident, but rather a calculated feature of a strategy designed to remain flexible and far-reaching.
To fully understand “double-carbon,”one must view it not only as a climate commitment, but also as a political signal, a vehicle for economic transformation, and a geopolitical maneuver.
Following Xi’s 2020 announcement, “double-carbon” quickly became a central organizing principle within China’s bureaucratic apparatus. The 14th Five-Year Plan, released in 2021, elevated carbon peaking to a national priority, instructing local governments to develop province-specific roadmaps. Ministries issued a flurry of sectoral guidelines covering energy, transport, steel, and construction. Many of these policies, however, remained high on ambition but vague on enforcement. In parallel, China launched a national emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2021, initially covering the power sector. Though hailed as the world’s largest carbon market, the ETS has so far remained limited in scope, plagued by weak price signals and significant compliance loopholes.
What is clear is that “double-carbon” is not just about reducing emissions. It is also a blueprint for the Party-state’s new imaginary of a carbon-neutral future. The policy aligns with other strategic state initiatives like “Made in China 2025” and “dual circulation,” reinforcing Beijing’s objective of transitioning toward high-tech, low-carbon industries that enhance energy security and global competitiveness. Green technology sectors, particularly solar, are positioned as frontiers of innovation and investment, with the state actively steering capital and talent toward them.
In this sense, “double-carbon” serves both as a climate strategy and an industrial policy — a framework through which China seeks to gain leverage in a decarbonizing global economy.
On the international stage, “double-carbon” functions as a geostrategic tool for global positioning. By making bold pledges in climate negotiations, China seeks to present itself as a responsible leader. This is a crucial point, especially at a time when many Global North countries have fallen short of their own commitments. Still, this does not automatically translate into trust. China’s continued financing of overseas coal projects (albeit at reduced levels) under the Belt and Road Initiative, along with the domestic surge in coal plant construction, has cast doubts on the credibility of its climate leadership.
This duality, between ambitious climate rhetoric and a pragmatic, coal-tolerant energy strategy, reveals something deeper about China’s stance on climate politics. Understanding the “double-carbon” policy, therefore, is not merely a matter of assessing environmental reforms. It requires grasping how a rising power crafts legitimacy, secures economic advantage, and consolidates political control in the era of climate crisis.
Authoritarian Efficiency or Strategic Theatre? Rethinking China’s Climate Governance
So far, the “double-carbon” policy has held up and become a model of top-down policymaking in Chinese politics. This prompts a critical question: In contrast to the policy gridlocks common in many democracies, is China’s ability to act swiftly evidence that authoritarian governments are better equipped to address the climate crisis? At first glance, judging by CO₂ emissions data, clean technology investments, and sprawling solar farms, it might appear so. But this framing warrants deeper scrutiny. Does authoritarianism truly enable more effective climate governance, or does it simply centralize the optics of action while masking structural inertia?
As some scholars argue, the growing appeal of eco-authoritarianism rests on several false equivalences: mistaking speed for success, control for competence, and urgency for emergency. Scholars like Nomi Claire Lazar and Jeremy Wallace caution against interpreting democratic delays as dysfunction and authoritarian efficiency as superiority. In reality, democracies offer vital tools for long-term climate resilience — flexible institutions, transparency, public accountability, and information feedback loops — that authoritarian systems often lack. What may appear as “climate leadership” in fact conceals institutional fragilities: limited pluralism, local resistance, manipulated data, and uneven policy enforcement across regions.
The case of China illustrates this complexity. While the central government sets aggressive targets, local authorities frequently undercut them, balancing carbon goals against industrial interests and social stability mandates — a dynamic that directly reflects the phenomenon of fragmented authoritarianism. The national emissions trading scheme, though symbolically powerful, currently lacks the enforcement power to meaningfully change corporate behavior. More troubling still, the absence of bottom-up accountability enables widespread manipulation of data on emissions, energy use, and environmental performance, undermining the very metrics used to gauge progress.
Far from being immune to elite capture, China’s climate governance is shaped by it in subtler but no less consequential ways.
Deciding the Future: Climate Action between Authority and Accountability
However ambitious and ambiguous it may be, the “double-carbon” policy has undeniably shifted the terms of climate discourse. It has redefined climate action in China not just as a technical or environmental issue, but as a vehicle for national development, geopolitical positioning, and regime legitimacy. Emissions are beginning to fall, renewable and clean energy capacity is booming, and the Party-state appears to be making climate a core priority. This matters not only environmentally, but also geopolitically: China is leveraging carbon governance to project responsibility, attract investment, and reshape the global landscape of climate leadership. Yet the instruments it employs — top-down, opaque, and often contradictory — embody a model of climate action that excludes democratic participation and environmental justice.
It seems that we are witnessing not a global convergence around effective solutions, but a divergence in political pathways. While democracies grapple with pluralism, polarization, and contested legitimacy, China consolidates authority and reframes climate action as a state-driven enterprise.
The danger lies in allowing efficiency to become the sole yardstick for climate governance, thereby casting democracy as inadequate.
This would be a costly mistake. If the climate crisis demands urgent collective action across states, communities, and sectors, then democracy, with all its complexity, contestation, and accountability, is not an obstacle but a necessary condition.
The real question is not whether democracy can “compete” with eco-authoritarianism, but whether it can adapt without sacrificing its foundational values. The future of global climate governance may hinge less on China’s ability to centralize control than on democracies’ capacity to decentralize power without losing direction. In a world that urgently needs climate action, the essential question is this: Will we end up mistaking decisiveness for legitimacy, or can we forge a climate policy that is both effective and democratic?
Ceren Çevik is a doctoral researcher in the IMPRS-SPCE program, a joint initiative of the Max Planck Institute for Study of Societies and the University of Duisburg-Essen.
