Understanding China's GHG (greenhouse gas) emission status is critical for achieving the national mitigation plan. While much attention has addressed China's national level GHG emission, less is known about its regional and sectoral emission features. In this paper China's regional and sectoral GHG emission patterns and their driving forces were explored by using upgraded energy consumption data. We constructed a detailed GHG inventory for each province in the year 2009 which covering 28 sectors and further expanded time-serious inventories during 1997-2009. We then conducted variation and index decomposition analysis to explore its sectoral/regional disparity and features. Results showed significant differences of sectoral emission intensity among different provinces, implying a huge disparity of technology level. Since less developed provinces still apply energy intensive technologies, they had contributed to most of national emission increment during 1997-2009 and made the whole country towards carbon intensive direction. Our research outcomes indicate that the inequity of technology level among regions has already become a main barrier for China's CO2 mitigation. Such a reality deserves more attention from both researchers and policy makers so that appropriate carbon reduction policies can be raised. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.