In order to evaluate and early warn the course of the sustainable development and the performance of local government in the construction of the harmonious “xiao kang” society，the Task Force developed an evaluating and early warning indicator system.

3.1 Indicators and early warning of harmonious “xiao kang” society

A harmonious xiao kang society dose not only means simply increasing the average GDP per capita;, but the overall standard of living for all Chinese must be all-inclusive and farily distributed across China alleviating the current disparities between rural and urban households and between coastal and inland households. Harmonious Xiao kang society does not only denote material comforts but harmonious development in all aspects, which includes issues of urbanization, promotion of education and reshaping the social strata. In other words, a xiao kang society is focused on the improved and sustained economic, social and environmental well-being of all citizens. So we combined Xiao kang with “harmonious” and call it as harmonious Xiao kang society. In the stage from 2006 to 2020, the harmonious Xiao kang society and sustainable development overlap each other in conception and connotation. Therefore, the target and indicators of harmonious society can be used to evaluate and early warn the local government performance and as well as the sustainable development.

The indicator selection is very important for evaluating、forecasting and early warning on the local performance of sustainable development with the indicator system. Each indicator should describe a certain features of sustainable development, moreover may obtain the corresponding data. Some of the key methodological issues that need to be kept in mind when considering the development of a system of indicators and indices along these lines are the following:

A. choice of a conceptual framework and the main categories of indicators;

B. choice of component indicators;

C. choice of policy targets related to each indicator;

D. methodology to establish a normalized (dimensionless) performance score for every indicator;

E. the weighting scheme for the indicator;

F. display for visually presenting the score of indicators and the index

3.2 The principles to evaluate and early warn the course of harmonious “xiao kang” society

According to international experiences, we proposed the principles of developing indicator system which can track, analyze and forecast the construction course of harmonious “xiao kang” society.

A. Establish a sustainability evaluating system or framework of which consisted with a suite of matching indicators of suitable sustainability performance. The framework and indicators would be constructed, prudently and incrementally, over time at both the national and regional/provincial levels.

B. Establish a clear set of sustainability and harmonious development value statements, sustainability criteria and measurable goal statements as a first step in developing and implementing sustainability indicators. The statements and criteria should be commonly accepted throughout China, yet respect unique local economic, social and environmental conditions;

C. Consider establishing sustainability standards, which are directly related to the sustainability values and criteria, and the total capital or genuine wealth condition analysis at the provincial or regional scale. Healthy competition amongst provinces and the sharing and benchmarking of best-practices, using indexed indicators, could be encouraged. Benchmarking sustainability performance, using aggregate sustainability indices across communities and provinces is possible and desirable for evaluating and early warning to the local government performance.

D. The indicator system not only has the evaluating function, but also has the function to guide the decision-making of local government, and in favor of establishing corresponding feedback mechanism to the policies. When a local government’s performance of sustainable development and result of evaluating to the construction of the harmonious “xiao kang” society are far away from the benchmark, there is need to send out the explicit early warning report to those governments.

3.3 Indicator system for the evaluating and early warning of China’s sustainable development and the course of harmonious “xiao kang” society.

Measuring progress toward desired targets of sustainable development and harmonious society construction in different regions helps to set policy priorities for local governments, and to perfect the monitoring system for centre government. (The indicators we chose were shown in Box 2.)

Moving from the current performance measurement system dominated by economy towards one including sustainability criteria and objectives will entail a multi-year, multi-level effort. China, like many other countries, is not new to these efforts. At various regional levels governmental institutions have been experimenting with sustainability indicators for several years. The task force chose six pilot cities to carry on experiment using the indicator system in box 2，and the data of four cities are complete. The evaluating result was shown in table 1.

During the process of the computation to the actual data，it usually adopts the average value of three years in history as the base number of the assessing year. The number changes along with time lapse，and guarantees the base number in each year changes based on the year-shift. This method may avoid the influence from the abnormity of some year (it happens in China frequently). To the integration of all indicators，we have adopted the weighted average method，that is to give the same weight to the indicators in the same level，and finally synthesize to an index. In fact, the index is a sustainable “Annual Progress Index” (API).

The API in each city by year obtained by this method is provided with the feature of time series. The time series of API reflects the change tendency of the comprehensive sustainable development of the evaluated cities，and also may be used to carry out early warning to the sustainability of cities. Though the comparison of the change rate of API among different cities，it can distinctly warn the sustainability differences of them.

The change and the comparative analysis of sustainable development API among different cities can provides useful basic information for the performance of different cities to central government。

The data in table 1 shows：the API of three cities were dropping comparing one of the 4 cities got a little rising. In the macroscopic early warning significance，during 2001-2003，the sum of the API of four cities dropped from 492.47 to 442.04，and dropped 17 points averagely each year. It shows that the overall sustainability of 4 cities is dropping. If the samples are more enough, it is viable to judge the whole change of the sustainability of the country.

In the significance of evaluating sustainable development performance to each city，the API of city A is the highest and the performance is the best；City B is next; and City C is the third; and city D is the worst.

Figure 3 the API of sustainable development in four pilot cities