As one of the biggest parts of total national energy consumption (TNEC), building energy consumption (BEC) catches public eyes and has been regarded as a crucial problem of the current society. For the past 20 years, BEC in china has been increasing at a high speed. To curb the rapid growing of BEC, china has enforced and implemented a series of policies. These include enforcing BEC constraints on new building projects, promoting more environment friendly building designs, establishing a more sophisticated legislation for building energy conservation, and increasing the total budget in the area of BEC control. This article analyzed china BEC situation and the challenges. As the main point, the measures required by China government to improve building energy efficiency were introduced as well. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.