Due to the increasing energy demands and global warming, energy quality management (EQM) for districts has been getting importance over the last few decades. The evaluation of the optimum energy systems for specific districts is an essential part of EQM. This paper presents a deep analysis of the optimum energy systems for a district sited in China. A multi-objective optimization approach based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) is proposed for the analysis. The optimization process aims to search for the suitable 3E (minimum economic cost and environmental burden as well as maximum efficiency) energy systems. Here, life cycle CO2 equivalent (LCCO2), life cycle cost (LCC) and exergy efficiency (EE) are set as optimization objectives. Then, the optimum energy systems for the Chinese case are presented. The final work is to investigate the effects of different energy parameters. The results show the optimum energy systems might vary significantly depending on some parameters. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.