Abstract: With the increasing impacts of both climate change and human activities, river basins were usually facing multiple water issues, which can impact water quantity, water environment, aquatic ecology and sediments. Simultaneously, increased frequencies of extreme hydrological events, such as droughts and floods, were observed. Thus, systematic management and retardation of extreme hydrological events became crucial goals of integrated water basin management. Raising the regulation capacity to multiple water cycling processes in a river basin is an important pathway. In this paper, based on the judgement of the China's major water issues, we analyzed the shortage of traditional water basin management, which relied on changing status of water cycling processes, end-of-pipe control technologies and the process dissociation. We analyzed the overall demand of solving water problems from a systematic level under the changing environment, the general idea of the ecological sponge-smart river basins construction, and proposed the theoretical framework and the critical research questions of the ecological sponge-smart river basins. The construction of ecological sponge-smart river basins should base on ① taking full consideration of the evolutional rules of multiple water cycling processes; ② regulating human activities, including exploring water and land resources; ③ achieving the joint regulation among the surface-soil-underground hydrological processes, including water quantity, water quality, sediments and aquatic ecosystem. We aimed to utmost retard extreme hydrological events, construct and improve comprehensive service functions of a river basin and achieve the conservations of the ecological functions of the ecosystems, including mountains, rivers, farmland, forests and lakes.