Building Energy Efficiency (BEE) policy in the transitional China-An Overview

China's future energy consumption in the building sector will have considerable influence on both China and the world energy markets. Building activities undertaken in China will have a significant influence on the global effort to reduce the growth, and the absolute quantity of greenhouse gas emissions. Energy policy plays an important role in China's sustainable development. In the building sector, government has implemented a great many of policies to improve energy efficiency. However, in the last 3 decades, these policies are designed and adjusted with a purpose to echo the economy status and national situation in each of stage in China. With reference to the previous studies on government's roles in promoting BEE (Qian and Chan, 2007, 2010), this paper traced the Building Energy Efficiency (BEE) policies back since 1980s and review the development of the policies^ the transitional China into four stages: Kick-off & demo stage 1980-1994, warming up stage 1995-2001, immediate action stage 2002-2005, and comprehensive promotion stage 2006-till now. The authors provide a broad overview of government involvements relating to energy efficiency issues in the built environment in China. This paper, firstly, introduces the five government's roles in promoting BEE and its market development; secondly, the authors review the key national BEE policies related to the built environment in the past three decades and demonstrate the government's environmental concern and efforts. Discussion on the implementation of the BEE policies and ways to be improved has been carried out. It thus provides a critical overall review and assessment of the policies and programs to understand BEE issues that will contribute to China's energy and economic future.