Donald J. Trump has said climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese to get the United States to suppress its manufacturing sector. That prompted a public rebuttal last week from a Chinese official attending a climate summit meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared to back away from the strict climate-denier viewpoint embraced by many Republicans in an interview with The New York Times, saying that there was “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change. He also said he wanted to keep an “open mind” about whether to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the main global climate change accord.

Mr. Trump’s opacity means it is unclear whether he will actually support policies to limit the effects of climate change after being sworn in as president in January. But officials from China, which has surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas, have said they will move forward on climate policies without the Americans, if it comes to that.

On Tuesday, Michael R. Bloomberg, the media tycoon and former mayor of New York City, said that American cities would continue to enact climate policies no matter what Mr. Trump and the federal government decided to do.