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English Thesis AbstractThis thesis was designed to study the potential influences of the Chinese political-economic context on the implementation of a greenhouse gas emissions trading system in China. An emissions trading system (ETS) is a cost-efficient market-based mechanism that puts a limit or a cap on the amount of emissions that participating entities in the carbon market are allowed to emit. A wide strand of literature on emission trading points out that emissions trading in China fundamentally differs from existing emissions trading systems in developed western-like jurisdictions. The major claim made in this paper builds on these assumptions and assumes that the Chinese emissions trading system is marked by the specific Chinese political-economic context in which it exists. Some distinct institutional, economic and political factors could possibly impose a challenging environment for the establishment of a carbon market and therefore stimulate Chinese regulators to adapt some of the design elements of an ETS to fit these characteristics. The aim of this study is to find an answer to following research question: How does China implement the market-based policy of carbon trading and adapts it to its particular political-economic context? To conduct this research, the paper builds on an analytical framework that was specifically designed to connect the four key elements for any ETS to work properly (1) with a set of Chinese domestic factors (2), which results in three supposed challenging environments for the implementation of an ETS in China. The first assumption is that Chinese politics could have an influence on the cap-setting process of the ETS; the second assumption is that the heavily regulated electricity sector and the dominance of the state-owned enterprises in the market could have an impact on the trading activity of the carbon market; and the third presumes that the Chinese institutional context could influence the monitoring- and compliance system of the ETS. To test these hypotheses, this study selected the implementation and design of the ETS in Guangdong province as a case study. Data and insights were collected from official data of the Guangdong government, European governments and other think thanks; and from the conduction of semi-structured interviews with experts involved in carbon trading. The main finding of this study is that although not all three assumptions were found to have an equally large influence on the effectiveness or design of the system, the set up of the ETS in China definitely requires a deeper understanding of the political-economic environment in order to fully recognize some of the fundamental elements that generates the existence of an emissions trading system with Chinese characteristics.