In order to enhance the resilience of sub-provincial cities in China and explore their sustainable development paths, this paper takes 15 sub-provincial cities as research objects and assesses their comprehensive resilience from 2011 to 2020 via the improved CRITIC-entropy weight combination method, TOPSIS method, variance decomposition method and barrier degree model, thus identifying and analyzing their barrier factors. The results show that: there has been a fluctuating upward trend and a relatively good situation in terms of their comprehensive resilience; there exist significant ranking differences in terms of their comprehensive resilience and sub-divided resilience factors; based on the variance decomposition results, the economic and ecological resilience contributes to the comprehensive resilience the most in the cities such as Ningbo, Chengdu, Changchun, and Harbin while the economic and social resilience makes the largest contribution among the remaining sub-provincial cities; based on the analysis of the barrier degree results, the economic system and social system are the main barriers restricting the resilience improvement of sub-provincial cities, specifically, public-library book collections per 100 people (b3) and general public budget revenue (a4) are the main barrier factors for most sub-provincial cities. In the future, sub-provincial cities should focus on making up for their drawbacks according to their development situation, and enhance their resilience by improving their social emergency guarantee systems, expanding the influence of social and cultural industries and increasing investment in the field of science and education. In this sense, the comprehensive power of sub-provincial cities can be enhanced.