Establishment of paid use system of natural resources is a key task for ecological civilization reform and a vital guarantee to deepen market-allocating natural resources and to drive a quality development. This paper, based on a research framework of “logic analysis-regime evolution-question discussion-path optimization”, analyzes its policy evolution and reveals the major issues and main challenges from the concepts of pay-for-using natural resources, and discusses the direction of and path to optimization with an intension to offer reference for further deepening reform. China's pay-for-using natural resources policy has undergone four stages, free-using, partially-pay-for-using, market-growing, and rule-optimizing, suggesting a continuous exploration and optimization in ranges, means, rights, gains and supervision. Reforming progress varies with resource categories, over-capitalization emerges in highly-market-involved commercial natural resources, but slowly-market-growth in natural resources of public interests. Three challenges are emerging, a higher requirement for synergism of governments and markets over dual supplies of natural resources, inappropriate property rights and gains distribution between upper- and down-stream, differentiated reform progress lagging behind resources supply and managements. For a purpose of optimizing paid use system of natural resources, this paper presents suggestions on top designing based on a principle of unified and division, on controlling entry and pricing mechanism in ruling governmental and market roles, and on clarifying economic relations among property owners and focusing on a loop designing of rules. 

Economic transformation and sustainable development in resources-based cities have been popular in research since the 20th century. China has lots of resources-based cities, it is vital to explore the path to upgrading economic transformation. This paper, reviews the policy settings, transformation achievement and issues in economic transformation and upgrade in China's resources-based cities, such as lagging alternative industry development, extensive resources processing and deviated execution of policy. This paper analyzes resources allocation, scientific innovation, and administrative adjustment and their mechanism from the bottlenecks of economic growth in resources-based cities, and establishes a theoretical framework of economic transformation upgrade in resources-based cities, and presents paths to upgrading economic transformation for resources-based cities, aiming at offering references for sustainable development of China's resources-based cities.