Rivers are the birthplace of human civilization and important carrier of regional economic development. The natural flow attributes of rivers inevitably involve governance methods that span regions and transcend subjects. In the critical period of social transformation, the problems reflected by river pollution have long gone beyond the scope of environment, economy and people’s livelihood. However, faced with unbalanced development of various river basins, independent governance subjects, and uneven regulatory standards, water governance has fallen into a vicious circle of "more governance, more pollution". In light of this, the CPC Central Committee has repeatedly emphasized the concept of promoting green development, advocates a Chinese-style modernization development path of harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, and also proposes specific strategies for precise control, coordinated management, and collaborative control of environmental pollution. As a new administrative model for water management, the river chief system can also serve as an important window for the ecological environment governance system to see the big picture from a small perspective, which fully meets the overall arrangement of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to improve eco-environmental governance system and deepen the reform of the ecological civilization system. To better explore the development of river chief system in practice, this paper adopts a multi-faceted typological analysis to collect the innovative practices of river chief system across China, combines quantitative and qualitative analysis through qualitative analysis software RQDA, forms three frameworks of legal basis, organizational structure and operation mechanism from strategy, decision-making and execution, hoping to summarize the types of innovation and the logics of the river chief system in the field of campaign-style governance. The study finds that the law provides a basis for the establishment and power operation of the institution of river chief system at the strategic level, the organizational structure flexibly adjusts the permission of the river official system from decision-making level, and also, incentive mechanism, assessment mechanism, supervision mechanism and accountability mechanism implement the administrative intentions of the river chief system from the executive level. It can be said that the beneficial exploration of river chief system in the field of water pollution not only summarizes valuable experience for government governance and reform, but also provides new ideas and directions, which has important driving role and promotion value.