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(Zhao, 2011). The National Garden Cities designation was later revised in
2004 by the Ministry of Housing and Urban and Rural Development
(MoHURD) with a “National Standard for Eco-Garden Cities” and again in
2005 to incorporate green building and public transport requirements. Since
1
1997 the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has named several
cities and districts as National Environment Protection Model Cities/Districts
(Baeumler et al., 2012). In 2001 MoHURD began selecting and praising cities
for the “China Habitat Environment Award” in accordance with the United
Nations Habitat Award, and in 2007 MEP announced revised Indices for Eco-
City and other subnational green designations with a range of socioeconomic
and environmental indicators (Baeumler et al., 2012).
This study focuses on China’s 11th Five Year Plan (2006e10) and 12th
Five Year Plan (2011e15) periods. The 11th Plan included the policy goal of
reducing sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) and other airborne pollutants (Cao et al., 2009),
including a 20% reduction in energy use per unit of gross domestic product
(GDP), while doubling per capita GDP. In 2009 before the COP-15 Climate
Negotiations in Copenhagen, China expressed its intention to reduce the
carbon intensity of its GDP by 40%e45% by 2020 from the levels of 2005
(Baeumler et al., 2012; NDRC, 2006). In 2009 the “China Low-Carbon Eco-
City Strategy” was launched by the Chinese Society for Urban Studies under
MoHURD, and 12 cities were designated as Eco-Cities, including Tianjin,
Shenzhen, and Changsha. In 2010 the National Development and Reform
Commission (NDRC) designated eight cities as low-carbon cities, including
Tianjin, Shenzhen, and Nanchang (Khanna et al., 2014).
The 12th Plan contained the first explicit targets to reduce carbon intensity
per unit of GDP by 17%, reflecting progress on shifting away from “growth at
any cost” (Zhang and Barr, 2013) and away from the coal-based industry
(Lewis, 2017) and for the first time included climate policy as a key compo-
nent of sustainable development (Sternfield, 2017). In 2011, the first year of
the 12th Plan, the NDRC selected Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing,
Hubei, Shenzhen, and Guangdong Province to carry out a carbon emissions
trading pilot scheme (Duan et al., 2014). By 2012 all Chinese prefectural-level
cities had announced some form of low carbon or eco-city development
strategy (Liu and Wang, 2017). In 2013 MoHURD launched joint international
Low-Carbon Eco-City program pilots in collaboration with the US Department
of Energy, which were carried out in Hefei, Langfang, Weifang, Rizhao, Hebi,
and Jiyuan (MoHURD, 2013).
There is a distinct difference in environmental protection performance
between the coastal, central, and western regions, where coastal cities have the
highest performance and the western region, being the furthest inland, has the
lowest performance. This is broadly reflected in two series of specially

1. Before 2008, MEP was the State Environmental Protection Administration.