Reducing the operational energy used to heat and cool buildings in China is key to mitigating climate change, as the building sector is a major emitter of CO2 emissions. Estimating the impact of introducing building retrofit and changes in energy standards for China is challenging due to the size and heterogeneity of the Chinese building stock as well as the lack of data availability. This project will develop a bottom-up building simulation framework with the goal of assessing the impact of the newly introduced zero emission building standard (ZEB) on the urban residential Chinese building stock. A methodological approach will be developed and tested for 4 different case study settings of 1 km2 using an archetypical approach to represent buildings and districts (i.e. superblocks).