As an institutional provision to promote the modernization of national governance, central environmental inspectors have gradually become normalized and are influencing the behavior and governance practices of local governments. There is still a lack of relevant empirical research on what kind of environmental behavior local governments exhibit under such normalized central environmental protection inspectors. This paper uses panel data for 287 prefectural-level cities in China from 2014 to 2020, and considers the establishment of the "six regional environmental protection inspectorates" in 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment of normalized environmental protection inspectors. The above questions were answered empirically. It was found that (1) although normalized central environmental protection inspectors push local governments to allocate more attention resources to environmental protection tasks, local governments adopt symbolic environmental protection behavior and selective environmental protection behavior under such normalized central environmental protection inspectors. Local governments neither take stricter punitive measures against non-compliant subjects, nor actively manage those pollutants that are not assessed by regular central inspectors; (2) the deterrent effect of regional environmental protection inspectorates has an obvious distance decay effect. When the distance from the local government to the regional environmental protection inspectorate to which it belongs is less than 200 km, the local government will converge on symbolic environmental behavior, yet selective environmental behavior will become more and more pronounced as the distance from the local government to the regional environmental protection inspectorate increases. This is due to the cost of environmental regulation caused by geographic distance; (3) the central government's financial support to local governments is most helpful for the regional environmental inspectorates to play a regular regulatory role, while the central government's personnel support and public participation can also compensate to some extent for the lack of a regular central environmental inspection system. The article portrays the behavioral choices of local governments under central supervision, which in turn provides empirical evidence for clarifying the effectiveness of the standing central environmental inspection system and policy insights for improving the design of the standing central environmental inspection system.