This paper examines institutional entrepreneurship in the development of China's environmental protection system (EPS) over a period of almost 30 years. China's EPS evolved in four main stages, the boundaries of which were marked by transition-critical events. Within each stage, institutional entrepreneurs conducted activities that supported trajectories of field development. These activities are analysed according to the way they contributed to the construction of regulative, normative and cognitive institutional system pillars. The formation of the EPS as an organizational field in China was characterized by a `made order' in which the regulative system came first and the state and its agencies dominated the process as the principal institutional entrepreneurs. In this respect it contrasts with the evolution of the same field in the USA.
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