The river chief system is an institutional innovation designed to mitigate the fragmentation of watershed governance in China. The idea was to develop offices of river chiefs and designate named individuals as responsible for water quality across all regions and levels of government. This article examines the mechanisms that led to the transfer of the river chief model from Wuxi to the Jiangsu Provincial government, Nantong, and Huzhou. The objective is to examine how and why Nantong officials created a virtual replica of the Jiangsu provincial policy, while Huzhou officials transformed the original Wuxi model to form their unique river chief. To do this, we undertook an extensive review of the core documents related to the river chief systems in Nantong and Huzhou, which led to a series of interviews, confirming our understanding of the procedures and outcomes of the transfer process. The result demonstrated the importance of motivation, structural context, and the ability to engage in re-engineering in policy transfer to understand the outcomes of the transfer process. As such, this study demonstrates, unlike much of the existing literature, that these aspects are worth further study when investigating the policy transfer process.