The construction of intramolecular donor-acceptor conjugated copolymers have been devised for years to enhance the mobility of charge carriers in organic photovoltaic field, however surprisingly, similar strategies have not been reported in polymeric photocatalytic systems for promoting the separation of charge carriers. Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C 3 N 4 ) is an emerging polymeric visible-light photocatalyst with high stability but still low photocatalytic efficiency. Here we prepared a series of g-C 3 N 4 -based intramolecular donor-acceptor copolymers, i.e., aromatics-incorporated g-C 3 N 4 , via nucleophilic substitution/addition reactions.The copolymer showed remarkably enhanced and stable visible-light photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance. The intramolecular charge transfer transition is firstly proposed to explain the photocatalytic activity of g-C 3 N 4 -baed photocatalysts under long wavelength-light irradiation.

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A novel and facile post-grafting strategy has been developed to construct aromatic heterocycle-grafted graphitic carbon nitride photocatalysts.