To improve the air quality, Chinese governments issued a series of policies to carry out the coal-togas (CTG) transition. However, the implementation of CTG switching policies has been hindered in practice, which has caused a lot of negative effects. Therefore, this essay aims to analyze the hindrances of the implementation of CTG switching policies in rural areas in Hebei province by using Qingzhou Town as a case, employing interviews on officials from implementing organizations and the questionnaire survey method for rural residents. The Smith Policy-Implementing-Process Framework (the Smith model) was used as the theoretical framework to provide a complete analysis of policy implementation hindrances regarding idealized policy, implementing organization, target group, and environmental factors. According to the survey results, there were 10 main hindrances including the problem with policy design, such as simplified policy goal and one-size-fits-all problem; the lack of flexibility, excessive implementation by the implementing organization; target group's weak environmental awareness, insufficient economic incentives, and low level of participation and policy understanding; several environmental factors, such as the imperfect supervision and performance evaluation mechanism, the ineffective market mechanism, limited gas resource channels, and insufficient infrastructure.

To improve air quality, Chinese governments issued a series of policies to carry out the coal-togas transition. However, the implementation of these policies has been hindered in practice, which has caused a series of negative effects. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the mechanism for hindrances of the implementation of coal-togas switching policies in China by using the archival research method. A systematic review of existing literature in Chinese coal-togas transition is used to select documents. The systematic review finds a total of 154 research articles from Google Scholar and CNKI and finally selects 20 articles based on the inclusion criteria regarding relevance to the research question, quality assessment, writing language, and accessibility. These articles are analyzed through frequency analysis to identify the importance of hindrances. The most frequent hindrance being mentioned in research articles is the insufficient gas infrastructure which is a common problem across many provinces in China. Economic issues including high prices and shortage funds are the second and third significant hindrances. Both of them are particularly common for Sichuan and Chongqing provinces. Local governments' excessive implementation belongs to the political issue, which is particularly serious in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area. The policy issue of one-size-fits-all ranks at the fifth most important position, which is also especially serious in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area. Finally, several political issues containing inadequate incentives for the target group, energy security and underdevelopment of natural gas are specific hindrances for Xinjiang province, although less being mentioned, also significant.