Abstract: Mining city plays an important role in the construction of national economy. How to enhance the core competitiveness of mining city and promote its sustainable development is a major issue to be solved nowadays. With such a perspective, by selecting three input indicators of energy consumption of ￥10, 000 GDP, fixed assets investment per capita, share of GDP in investment of pollution control; two output indicators of the rate of mining waste comprehensive utilization and the rate of the destruction of land mine recovery form a mining city efficiency evaluation index system. By studying nine different types of mining cities from different regions, and three outstanding mining cities as reference, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method is applied to evaluate and optimize the development bottleneck and efficiency. The results show that by digging mining resource potential of the mining city, building diversified development strategy, and strengthening ecological and environmental protection by the way of technological innovation, can complete the reform of mining city and enhance the core competitiveness of mining cities.