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Given the increasing interest in keeping global warming below 1.5°C, carbon emissions reduction has become a hot topic. However, the regional disparities and the driving factors were not paid enough attention. This article established an indicator to describe the catch-up effort of different regions and proposed a temporal-spatial production-theoretical decomposition model using meta-frontier and global-frontier to capture the driving forces of the catch-up effort of different provinces to benchmarking provinces. The new model was applied to analyze China's regional carbon emissions during 2007 to 2018. The main findings from the empirical study are: (1) Overall, the regional carbon emissions and their spatial variation kept increasing during the study period. (2) Economic activity, potential carbon factor, carbon-abatement technology efficiency and regional carbon-abatement technology gap were the main drivers. (3) The improvement efforts of carbon-abatement, energy-saving technical efficiency, and potential energy intensity were the dominant factors inhibiting the growth of carbon emissions. (4) The improvement efforts of advanced technology and potential energy intensity helped to reduce the regional gaps, but their impacts varied considerably across regions in China.