In October 2015, the first Sino-German International Symposium on “Sustainable Utilization of Geothermal Energy” was held at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS), Beijing, China. Around 120 researchers attended the meeting. It was agreed by the participants that a special issue of the papers presented at the symposium on Chinese geothermal systems be organized and published in the international journal “Environment Earth Sciences”. Up to today, when we close the special issue, 30 papers have been accepted and published in this issue. From these papers one can find out the major progress made in geothermal energy studies in China in the past 5 years or so and, therefore, the papers provide a comprehensive overview of recent geothermal research in China.

According to the statistics published by the International Geothermal Association (IGA) in 2015, China had continued to lead the world in terms of total amount of geothermal used yearly for space heating and other direct use purposes. The present Thematic Issue covers studies on shallow geothermal energy (0–200 m), medium-deep hydrothermal energy (200–3000 m) as well as deep “hot dry rock” petrothermal energy (> 3000 m) in China. A prior introduction to studies on hydrothermal systems can be found in Kong et al. (2014). In the following we will highlight each of the papers in this Thematic Issue, and locations of study areas can be found in Fig. 1.