Preface

China's road to sustainability has attracted global attention. Since the "Reform & Opening Up" policy, China's rapid pace of both urbanization and industrialization has made its being the second largest economy but meantime a heavy environmental price has been paid over the past few decades for addressing the economic developmental target. Today, as the biggest developing country, China needs to take more responsibilities for constructing its local ecological-civilization society as well as for addressing the global challenges such as climate change, resources scary and human beings well-fare; therefore, we need to have deeper understandings into China's way to sustainability at very different levels, both spatially and structurally, concerns ranging from generating sustainable household livelihoods to global climate change, from developing technological applications to generate institutional changes. In this spirit, this publication, "Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action" aims to investigate the intended and spontaneous issues concerning China's road to sustainability in a combined top-down and bottom-up manner, linking international knowledge to local-based studies.

It goes without say that we are deeply grateful to all the authors who contributed to this publication. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Sincerely appreciation goes to the editorial team of the journal Sustainability of MDPI- namely Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Marc A. Rosen, Managing Editor Dr. Le Zhang, Assistant Editor Yaqiong Guo, Ms. Vicky Hu, Ms. Hui Liu, Ms. Shuang Zhao, Ms. Jing Li, Ms. Jie Gu and Ms. Anna Chen.

Last but not the least, we would like to thank the support from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) Potsdam, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship Program under China Postdoctoral Council (20140050), and the Natural Science Foundation of China (41471116, 41101126, 71303230).

Bing Xue and Mario Tobias *Guest Editors* 
