Developing the Changjiang (Yangtze) River and building a developed economic zone along the bank area of the Changjiang River is a great strategic decision of the national macroeconomic development distribution. This decision has both given an impetus to fast development of the regional economy and exacerbated the contradiction among economy and resources and environment. In this paper, some major problems existing in economic sustainable development, such as scattered industrial structure, duplicated construction of the great projects, enlarging the development gap of the regional economy and deteriorated environment etc., have been studied. The results show that scattered structure and duplicated distribution of some key industries and projects, especially automobile, electronics and petrochemical industry and communication, power installations, is one of the reasons for low industrial economic benefit; the great development gap among upper, middle and lower reaches areas are enlarging since the 1990’s; soil erosion, flood disaster and environmental pollution are still exacerbating due to unreasonable over-development. Based on the above analysis, this paper brings out some countermeasures and proposals for increasing the ability of regional sustainable development, including transregional reorganization of industrial structure linking by assets and speeding the process of regional economy integration; gradually controlling and reducing the development gap among upper, middle and lower reaches areas through regional cooperation on a mutually beneficial basis; as well as strengthening ecological construction and environmental protection and increasing environmental bearing capacity etc.
