Abstract: Two indicators, domestic environmental load and efficiency, are defined to measure the aggregate environmental pressure and the comprehensive environmental efficiency of a country's economic operation, respectively. The indicators are applied to study empirically China's economic development from 1990 to 2002. The results show that China's environmental efficiency increased at an annual rate of 5.6% in this period, which indicated that a relative environmental depressurization was realized to a certain degree with economic development. On the other hand, it is revealed that more than 90% of the total domestic environmental load comes from the excavation and disposal of domestic hidden flow of which about 60% to 70% was caused by agriculture related activities. It follows that the end-of-pipe pollution control alone is far from solving efficiently the environmental problems as a whole, and the fundamental way is to reduce the resource demand at the source and pay more attention to the environmental impact due to agriculture.