Abstract: With “Characteristic” as its key, characteristic towns have become a crucial breakthrough point for China’s new-type urbanization and urban-rural integration. Different from “Features”, “Characteristic” has its own judging standards, which are more complicated. Based on this background, this paper starts with the connotation characteristics and existing problems of the characteristic town. On the basis of analyzing and discussing the limitation of characteristic thinking, developing nonlinearity, uncertainty, characteristic livability and other deep propositions, this paper points out that the characteristic of characteristic town lies not only in the regional differentiation and ideal differentiation, but also in the feedforward differentiation of planning control system and the differentiation of adaptive choice in the process of history and competition. Therefore, it is necessary to perfect the periodic control mechanism and market adoption mechanism, adopt the method of historical evaluation, set the special evaluation measures as the priority, set judging good as the assist, and use other special countermeasures and selection criteria. Finally, focusing on the logic thread of the characteristic strategy - promoting the urban and rural development of our country to walk the way of adaptability intelligently, this paper discusses the characteristics of industry, environment and community characteristics, cultural characteristics, facility and service characteristics, system mechanism innovation and proposes several specific countermeasures.