From the perspective of equity and efficiency, we investigated the difference of carbon production in different provinces and then compared the importance of equity principle and efficiency principle, which is of great significance for the government to formulate a scientific regional carbon emission reduction policy. With the data about 29 provincial-level regions in China from 1997 to 2015,this study firstly calculated the carbon emission efficiency of each province using Super-SBM model, taking capital stock, labor force and energy consumption as input variables, GDP and CO2 emissions as expected and nonexpected output variables; and calculated the carbon emission equity by the amount carbon emissions per capita. Secondly, based on ArcGIS software, the carbon emission equity and carbon emission efficiency at the beginning and the end of the study period were visualized to study the spatial pattern and differences among them. Finally, the Dagum Gini decomposition method and Markov Chain method were adopted to compares the regional differences of carbon emission equity and efficiency from two aspects: the degree of overall differences and the solidification of internal differences. The results show as follows: (1) There is more and more obvious inconsistency between carbon emission equity and efficiency in different regions of China, and the importance of equity principle and efficiency principle is different for different regions. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the important differences of the two principles for different regions. (2) The degree of difference in China’s carbon emission efficiency, whether as a whole or between the three Regions is greater than that of equity, and the difference between them is not going to be narrowed. In terms of contribution sources, regional differences are the main reason for overall differences in carbon emission efficiency, while the overall differences in carbon emission equity takes a small influence relatively. (3) The degree of solidification of regional differences in carbon emission efficiency is also higher than that of carbon emission equity; China’s regional “longterm low efficiency” solidification problem of carbon emissions is more serious than that of regional “longterm low equity”.Therefore, this paper argues that the principle of efficiency is more important than the principle of equity in calculating China’s regional carbon emission reduction potential and carbon emission reduction quota allocation. The central government should also pay more attention to the difference of regional carbon emission efficiency, start from the efficiency of carbon emissions, tap the potential of carbon emission reduction, and give more support to those areas with “long-term low efficiency” of carbon emissions.
