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Sustainable development goals (SDGs) emphasize a holistic achievement instead of cherry-picking a few. However, no assessment has quantitatively considered the evenness among all 17 goals. Here, we propose a systematic method, which first integrates both the evenness and the overall status of all goals, to distinguish the ideal development pathways from the uneven ones and then revisit the development trajectory in China from 2000 to 2015. Our results suggest that, despite the remarkable progress, a bottleneck has occurred in China since 2013 due to the stagnant developments in some SDGs. However, many far-reaching policies in China have been targeting these deficiencies since then, providing a perspective on how a country approaches sustainable development by promoting evenness among all SDGs. Our results also indicate that regions with the slowest progress are the developed provinces, owing to the persistent uneven status of all goals. Our study demonstrates the importance of adopting evenness in assessing and guiding sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]