Strategic choices: China’s challenges of

China faces a multitude of fundamental challenges in its present state of transformation and development – in social, economic, technical, and administrative terms, etc. This pa-per focuses on the cross-section of three elements: (i) China’s current and dramatically developing energy trends, profoundly different from projections made only a few years ago, (ii) implications, to the implementation of centrally adopted policy instruments and decrees, of China’s transition from a planned to a market-based economic sys-tem, and (iii) global climate change. Putting the spot-light on the point of this cross-section reveals a turmoil of actors on a stage, where short- and long-term agendas clash, tradi-tional governance systems fail, and different policy frame-works – local, provincial, central, regional and global – are in disarray and misalignment. On this chaotic stage, academics and policy planners ap-ply their analytic skills to construct scenarios and to identify key conditions for the arrival at different futures, benign or less appealing in various degrees. This paper suggests how, in failing to account for the present, these futures are often inherently flawed. In consequence, it is argued that the logic of scenario- and policy-making needs to be adapted to the logic and incentives of actual stakeholders, rather than that of modelled ones, in order to better serve as guidance to a China that has to meet the challenges of rapid change on multiple fronts. Viewing the future In an initiated narrative, bringing together decades ’ worth o