Abstract: The emission permit system is an effective way to control the total amount of pollutants. The EU adopts IPPC as the supporting regulations and constraints emission reduction targets of member states based on the best available techniques (BATs). The emission permit in Japan has emission standards developed based on the pollutant total control, and determines the control standard values for various pollutants according to different industries and facilities and decides the emission control amount of pollutions on the basis of production processes and wastewater treatment technologies. The United States implements the national pollutant discharge elimination system(NPDES) emission permit system in combination of "water quality-based standards" and "technology-based standards". At the present, China’s emission permit system takes the model of the combination of total amount control and concentration control, with the problems of mismatching of the state’s total amount control, enterprises wastewater treatment technology limits and environmental capacity, etc. By comparing the emission permit systems in various foreign countries and in combination with the characteristics of China’s emission permits system, the design ideas and suggestions were proposed, including taking the combination of "top-down" and "down-top" as the basic principle, integrating targeted total amount control, industry total amount control and capacity total amount control, taking source control and whole-process pollution prevention and control measures to build China’s emission permit system.