Nitrogen oxides (NO x) has become the priority of China's air pollution control, but the regional socioeconomic factors responsible for NO x generation are embedded with spatial disparities, which leads to different effects of air quality policy at the local level. This study applied a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to investigate the drivers of NO x generation from energy consumption (NGEC) in China's 30 provinces, to explore nonstationary spatial effects of NGEC. The results showed that population size has always been the dominant factor in spatial NGEC across all regions of China, although there is a minor north-south difference. However, the Junfeng Wang a,b, *