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Urban development based on the “carrying capacity” of its resources and environment is a key principle for China’s green development stated in its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020). It is, however, difficult to understand the carrying capacity especially in coastal and marine areas. A Pressure–Support (PS) framework was designed to illustrate the relationships of pressures and support and the integrated carrying capacity of a given coastal and marine area. A PS index was then developed based on the framework to apply to a case study in the coastal and marine areas of Guangxi Province, China. The evaluation results showed a decreasing marine carrying capacity trend and indicate major pressures from land reclamation, fishing, coastal industry, port construction and tourism activities. This case study demonstrates a practical approach to disentangling complex information around the carrying capacity of coastal areas, which could be an effective tool for facilitating related policy making in sustainable coastal and marine development.

China has been working for nearly four decades to establish marine protected areas (MPAs). After the 2018 institutional reform, all the protected areas were integrated into a unified management by the Ministry of Natural Resources. Therefore, it is urgent to summarize management experiences and put forward new management countermeasures. In this study, we analyzed the development process of China's MPAs and show that, after a long-term increase, both number and area of newly built MPAs shrank after 2008. No-take marine nature reserves used to largely contribute to the MPA network. However, because of the shortage of land for economic development, willingness to build nature reserves in coastal areas, as opposed to reclamation and other marine exploitations, was relatively low nationwide in the last decade. Thus, marine special protected areas, which were smaller and with multiple-use strategies, became more important. Top-down decision-making process, decentralization, and unbalanced spatial distribution are the main challenges hampering an effective MPA network. In China, a unified jurisdiction of MPAs was implemented after institutional reform, which made a new top-level design possible. Appropriate categorization consisting of fully protected and multiple-use MPAs, a balanced system integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches, and a flexible and adaptive MPA network are suggested to achieve sustainable development of China's MPAs.