Carbon neutrality commitment for China: from vision to action

China’s newly announced carbon neutrality goal manifests its determination to advance green and low-carbon development. The country aims to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Consequently, guidelines and action plans have been actively deployed and issued. The carbon neutrality commitment (vision) and its detailed deployment (action) would contribute to climate change mitigation and corporate market value. Therefore, we categorize the carbon neutrality-related events and analyze their impacts on the stock market from July 2020 to March 2021. The main findings are as follows: (1) The action event have increased the carbon neutrality-related stocks by 0.04%, while that of the vision event is – 0.003%, indicating that investors’ confidence increases when the carbon neutrality commitment is accompanied by specific and detailed guidelines. (2) The impact of carbon neutrality announcement becomes more positive and significant after related events occur repeatedly. (3) Carbon neutrality-related power industry and state-owned enterprises are potential beneficiaries of this decarbonization goal. Our study supplements the literature on climate policy and its economic value, potentially contributing to the next stage of global decarbonization.