High-quality guided development and environmental forcing are two routes for China’s green development, and each has different focuses and outcomes. The aim of this study is to clarify coordinated mechanisms to reveal the reasons and determine paths for China’s green development. A research framework for synergetic evolution is established, and the Haken model is applied to analyze the different effects of high-quality development that guide resource- and environmental-forcing mechanisms. This research showed that: (1) the preferred route and key factor in China’s green development is high-quality developmental guidance; (2) high-quality development and environmental-forcing mechanisms are non-coordinated, and while the former might coordinate with the latter, the latter does not; (3) mutual promotion of high-quality developmental guidance and the resource mechanism was not observed; (4) the critical point coordinated value is 0.5686 for China’s green development. Eastern China possesses a relatively high level of green development, while the north, east, west, and central areas of the country still have much progress to make.

In order to improve the banking sustainability in China, China’s government has announced that the restrictions on foreign shareholding ratio in domestic banks will be canceled. However, the effectiveness of foreign strategic investment needs checking. In addition, under the new policy, the method by which banks formulate appropriate internal decisions about introducing foreign strategic investment is an important issue for bank managers. Continuous productivity growth will bring sustainable development; therefore, the aims of this paper are: (1) to find the relationship between foreign strategic investment and productivity change of China’s banks, and to verify the effectiveness of introducing foreign strategic investment; (2) to find the optimal foreign shareholding ratio; (3) to show how foreign strategic investment affects the productivity of China’s banks, i.e. the transmission mechanism between them, and to provide bank managers with evidence and support for making decisions on introduction of foreign strategic investment. This paper employs the Malmquist-Luenberger index and combines it with Epsilon-based-measure to derive a new index, i.e. the EBM-Malmquist-Luenberger index, to measure the dynamic productivity change of China’s banks. In addition, the dynamic panel data and system GMM estimator are used to analyze the transmission mechanism as well as the impact of foreign strategic investment on the productivity of China’s banks. The results revealed three facts. First, when the foreign shareholding ratio increases within a given range, foreign strategic investment continuously improves the productivity and sustainability of China’s banks. Second, an inverse N-shaped relation between foreign strategic investment and productivity growth of China’s banks is supported, and the optimal foreign shareholding ratio is 20.16%. Last but not least, foreign strategic investment improves the productivity and sustainability of China’s banks, mainly through changing scale efficiency. The results of this paper may provide support for policy formulation of China’s banks.

High-quality environmental governance (EG) is closely related to its governance mode. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the EG modes from the dual perspectives of quality and quantity. This article utilizes panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2020 to research the influence of environmental governance efficiency (EGE) and investment (EGI) on EG through a fixed-effect mode. The outcomes show that China’s EG is driven mainly by quantitative EGI. EGE and EGI show significant geographic regions, economic development levels, resource endowments, and stage heterogeneity to EG. In light of these conclusions, this article argues that the future needs to reasonably allocate EGI based on consideration of the heterogeneity of geographical regions, economic development levels, and resource endowments to optimize EGI structure and increase EGE in each province to achieve high-quality EG.