Geopolitical Pressure and the Resilience of China’s Resource Governance System on the Pathway to an Environmental Economy

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

China’s resource, energy transition and supply chain governance institutions are increasingly tested by geopolitical pressure centred on China. Treating that pressure as the external environment of the national governance system, this study asks where it reaches the material foundations of the pathway to an environmental economy, transition-critical metals and clean energy equities, and where it is contained. We construct a relative measure that isolates China-centred geopolitical risk from global tension and analyse monthly returns from July 2008 to July 2026 with instability-robust causality tests, ex-ante confrontation regimes and a trivariate structural vector autoregression, with designated primary tests under multiplicity control and exploratory 24-month rolling windows and quantile methods. China-centred pressure predicts higher returns for nickel, tin and a copper–nickel–aluminium basket only inside export control regimes, an effect concentrated in the 2010–2011 episode. Metal returns predicted China-centred tension until around early 2011, with an imprecisely estimated break date. The adjusted evidence for both relationships reaches the 10% level. Clean energy equity returns show no detectable response to China-centred, Chinese or global geopolitical risk, whereas they persistently predict metal returns. The evidence is consistent with a governance system that contains external pressure outside confrontation regimes; clean energy market conditions, not geopolitical shocks, are the more robust predictor of metal returns.