The Chinese government has increasingly recognized the transition to a green economy as a long-term strategy, to boost its economic growth along a sustainable path and protect its environment from further deterioration. This industrial and energy transition is evidenced by China’s adoption of economic and energy policies in recent years. For instance, of the 4 trillion Renminbi (RMB) Yuan economic stimulus package adopted in 2008, 210 billion RMB (5.25%) was invested in energy saving, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and environmental engineering projects. The twelfth Five Year Plan (FYP) (2011-2015) aims at reducing the country’s energy intensity by an additional 16% (relative to the eleventh FYP) and carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 17% (relative to 2010).

The rationales behind the transition to green economy are driven by environmental, economic, and social considerations. The rapid economic development in China has left the country with a heavy environmental toll, including deteriorating air quality due to coal burning and other industrial pollutions, surging greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel consumptions, degrading water quality and resources, and worsening rural environment and land-based ecosystem. A transition to a low carbon society has become a priority on China’s policy agenda to address environmental problems and upgrade economic structures.

Green jobs and businesses are critical for a low carbon society. For Chinese government, fast economic and employment growth are both important policy goals. But except for a few forecasting studies based on input-output models, there are no empirical data regarding the number of green jobs and businesses in China, as well as their geographic distributions. The lack of empirical data not only makes it hard to evaluate the current status of green economy in China, but it also makes policy evaluations on government policies an impossible task.

This paper is an effort to address several related research questions. First, we address the accounting of green jobs businesses in China through a ground-up data collection approach. Instead of using project-level data and questionnaires, we resort to micro-level establishment level data to assess the clean energy economy across 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, and 4 direct-controlled municipalities, with specific green jobs data on 282 prefecture-level cities. With city-level green jobs data, we then try to establish the link between China’s subnational green energy policies and the number of green jobs in Chinese cities. We then employ regression models to explain the distribution of green jobs. The preliminary results indicate that provincial level clean energy industrial policies are significant drivers for fast growth in local green economy.