China's global leadership aspirations and domestic support for climate policy

C. Xiang and T. van Gevelt

Ecological Economics, 2025, vol. 227, issue C

Abstract: In recent years, China has pivoted towards a global leadership role in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Notwithstanding the complex political economic reasons underlying China's global leadership aspirations, we are interested in seeing whether the associated national discourse championed by the state increases domestic support for climate policy. That is, do China's international leadership aspirations foster a unifying sense of national pride among the domestic population, thereby lending support to the legitimacy of the state and expediting the implementation of costly domestic climate policies? To test our hypothesis, we enumerated a vignette experiment embedded with conjoint analysis to a nationally representative sample (n = 4788). We found no evidence that exposure to China's global leadership aspirations increased domestic support for national-level climate policy, as proxied by a carbon tax. Indeed, we found that exposure to China's global climate leadership aspirations decreased domestic support for a carbon tax under certain scenarios. Our findings demonstrate a potential disconnect between global and local climate policy discourses and suggest that China's policymakers need to exercise caution in ensuring that their global climate leadership aspirations do not come at the expense of decreased domestic support for the national-level policies required to meet China's goal of carbon neutrality by 2060.

Keywords: Climate change; Climate policy; Climate leadership; Carbon tax; Vignette experiment; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924003379
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:227:y:2025:i:c:s0921800924003379

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108440

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().