Faced with the real demand of manufacturing industry to achieve the goal of green and high-quality development, exploring spatiotemporal heterogeneity and the spatial spillover effect of green manufacturing efficiency under environmental regulation can help reveal the path and mechanism of green development in the manufacturing industry. By using the SBM-DEM model to measure green manufacturing efficiency at the urban scale in China, exploratory spatial analysis is used to characterize the spatiotemporal differentiation of urban green manufacturing efficiency from 2003 to 2018. With the help of the spatial Durbin model, the impact of environmental regulation on green manufacturing efficiency and the spatial spillover effect are demonstrated. The results show that: (1) The green manufacturing efficiency of cities has developed in a gradual and balanced manner in time series, and the degree of equalization is stronger in the eastern coast than in the western inland; (2) Urban green manufacturing efficiency patterns are misaligned with economic scale patterns, indicating that green manufacturing is not traditionally dominated by economic factor inputs; (3) The practice of Chinese cities has proved that environmental regulation can significantly inhibit the development of green manufacturing efficiency in local cities. The crowding-out effect and optimization effect of environmental regulation on other external factors indirectly affect green development. By comparing different spatial weight matrices, it is shown that the economic relationship between cities can offset the inhibition of environmental regulation; (4) Although environmental regulation under spatial interaction would have significantly contributed to the green manufacturing efficiency of neighboring cities, this contribution effect is insignificant and weak due to the economic interactions between cities. Empirical research provides a theoretical foundation for the development of green manufacturing from the standpoint of environmental regulation, allowing green development research in manufacturing to move further.
