Over the past 30 years, water security issue in Chinese cities has become increasingly serious, largely due to rapid urbanization, population growth and disproportionate investment in water infrastructure. Urban rainwater harvesting (URWH), a household and community-level rainwater management measure, has been widely used during this period. This study provides a critical review of the policies, methods, technology, construction, implementation and benefits related to URWH in China. We show that URWH in China has gone through three phases over the past 30 years: an initial development phase, a rapid development phase and a sponge city construction phase. URWH research has focused mainly on rainwater harvesting, storage, utilization, management and other technologies, with limited attention to policy and benefit analysis. However, the scale of URWH construction and implementation in China remains small and needs further development. Currently, while URWH assessments cover social, ecological and environmental benefits, the economic benefits need to be further strengthened. The next step in URWH implementation should be to strengthen research and development of policy, legal and design standards. This study provides guidance for the implementation of URWH in Chinese cities and other cities alike in developing countries.

Residential areas are important for the underlying surface of a city, and the sponge construction of a residential area is a key topic in sponge city construction. Taking the Zi-Jing community as the research case, the SWMM model was established for simulation, and the rainwater runoff control, collection, and utilization were compared and analyzed before and after the implementation of sponge transformation for the designed rainfall conditions of once in 3, 5, 10, 20, and 50 years. The results showed that the water depth of the four outlet pipes was not a full tube at the first peak time. The full duration time was reduced to 1–5 h at the second peak, and the flow reduction rate at the pipe outlet was between 30% and 100%. The water storage of sub-catchments A1, A3, and A4 increased significantly and continued to increase after the peak rainfall occurred, while that of A2 decreased significantly after the transformation after the transformation. For the whole residential area, the surface runoff decreased by 37–47%, while the surface water storage and infiltration increased by 8–14% and 23–39% respectively after reconstruction. The direct storage volume of rainwater in the four sub-catchment areas was filled at least once above a once in 5 years scenario. The main conclusions were as follows: Sponge transformation in residential areas with 17.46% sunken greenbelt and 40.85% permeable pavement, and the time of the pipe outlet in full status can be shortened by 30–200 min in different rainfall return periods. With the increase in the rainfall return period, the improvement range of the infiltration increased from 23.36% to 39.54%, the improvement range of the storage capacity for rainwater decreased from 14.36% to 8.06%, and the reduction degree of surface runoff increased from 37.73% to 47.43%. The water consumption for flushing is about 30 m3 per day for 1000 people, and the rainwater storage volume of 765 m3 in this study can meet the flushing water demand of 5000 residents in the community for 3–5 days.