Resilient cities, as a concept of urban disaster mitigation and risk management, has entered China's policy arena and have been included in China's 14th Five-Year Plan and promoted as a central policy advocacy, while the State Council's " Role Model City for Safe Development (RMCSD)" is an important localization of the concept of resilience. Traditional policy innovation diffusion studies focus on the adoption of policies, but ignore the implementation efforts. Based on the dual perspectives of policy adoption and policy implementation, this paper collects data from 281 sub-provincial and prefecture-level cities in China during 2010-2021, and analyzes the factors influencing the adoption and implementation of the RMCSD policy by local governments from three aspects, including organizational structure, administrator characteristics and environmental factors. The results show that there are commonalities and differences in the driving logic of local government policy adoption and implementation, with provincial push, peer pressure, city administrative level, and socioeconomic characteristics influencing both local government policy adoption and policy implementation. Central signals are a significant influence on local government policy adoption, but not on sustained policy implementation; local government fiscal pressures have insignificant effects on policy adoption, but significantly impede sustained policy implementation. Neither the origin of key city officials nor previous accident experience had a significant effect on policy adoption or policy implementation efforts. This study provides the first comprehensive picture of the implementation of the resilient city concept in urban governance in China and contributes to further understanding of the complex characteristics of the policy diffusion and implementation process.