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

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. •We develop a systematic typology of global climate leadership.•We enumerate a vignette experiment to a nationally representative sample.•We find a disconnect between international and local climate change discourses.•Global leadership aspirations may undermine domestic performance legitimacy.