Journal of Engineering Research and Reports

Engineering–procurement–construction (EPC) general contracting has become an important instrument in China’s effort to reorganise project delivery around integrated responsibility for design, procurement and construction. Its expansion has been encouraged by national rules that clarify employer requirements, contractor qualifications, integrated project management and responsibility for quality, safety, time and cost. Yet the research field remains fragmented. Domestic studies often isolate contractor capability, prefabricated construction, contractual risk, interface management or digital tools, while studies of Chinese contractors overseas emphasise political, logistics and claims risks. This critical narrative review integrates these strands and evaluates how far the accumulated evidence supports common claims about EPC performance in China. Literature published from 2003 to 1 June 2026 was identified through accessible scholarly indexes, DOI metadata, institutional repositories, official Chinese governmental sources and citation searching. The evidence indicates that EPC’s central advantage is not risk transfer by itself but the potential to coordinate interdependent decisions across the project life cycle. Realisation of that potential depends on clear employer requirements, proportionate risk allocation, mature design and supply-chain capability, effective interface governance, and incentives that reward whole-project optimisation. The strongest China-focused evidence concerns risk identification, governance mechanisms and capability structures; the evidence is weaker for causal improvements in cost, schedule, quality, innovation and life-cycle value. Much of the literature relies on cross-sectional surveys, expert scoring, structural models or single cases, which illuminate mechanisms but provide limited counterfactual evidence. Research on prefabricated buildings and railway projects shows that EPC can reduce fragmentation only when organisational and information interfaces are deliberately managed. Digitalisation, including building information modelling, integrated data environments and artificial-intelligence-assisted contract review, is promising, but its benefits remain contingent on data quality, standardisation and organisational redesign. The review concludes that future progress requires project-level longitudinal datasets, transparent comparison groups, standard performance measures and closer examination of how national rules interact with local implementation and sector-specific conditions.