The Chinese ecological red line constitutes an important systemic innovation for environmental protection, providing a minimum guarantee of ecological security and human health. Therefore, the red line has played an important role in the field of ecological protection, not only optimizing ecological security but also relating resource protection to economic development. Most importantly, it is a bottom line for China's construction of an ecologically sustainable civilization. In the initial stages, ecological red line protection meant a strictly administered strategic border for the maintenance of national and regional ecological security and economic and social sustainable development. The early development of natural resource conservation concepts and policy saw similar methods and practices at home and abroad. Foreign countries commonly use national park systems, special protection areas (SPAs), special areas of conservation, Natura 2000, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature-Global Protected Areas to protect ecological spaces. China has generally used nature reserves, country parks, basic ecological control lines, and national zoning of ecological and subjective functions to achieve the same ends. Among these, the extensively used basic ecological control line is regarded as the prototype for the ecological red line. After the proposal of the red line concept, Jiangsu Province was the first to officially implement the concept in China. In this year's annual Local NPC and CPPCC, the ecological red line has been incorporated into the work reports of many provincial governments, showing that drawing the red line has entered the strategic promotion phase. With the progress study, the concept of the ecological red line has been extended to a comprehensive system covering three aspects:space, resources, and quality of environment. Based on relevant literature and the relationships between production, life, and ecological space, the foundation of its theory extensions comes from the theory of ecological risk source of regional development established by Ren Jingming et al., including the ecological footprint, resource consumption and pollution emissions accumulated three types. The ecological red line is extending into ecological space, resource consumption, and environmental protection, and further proposes to control requirements, including the warning to the top line, the regulation to the midline, and the maintenance of the bottom line. Meanwhile, the system of ecological red lines is implemented based on a case study of the Ningde region. The results showed that the total area enclosed within an ecological red line is 4258.03 km², accounting for 31.65% of the total land area of Ningde. The red line of resource consumption and environmental protection is the concrete implementation of control requirements, and formed red indicators. Finally, a supporting safeguard mechanism will be established from three aspects (regulations, systems, and markets) in order to provide a reference for further improvements of the red line system.