A program of electron cyclotron heating (ECH) with 4 MW at 140 GHz has been launched for developing scenarios of stable high performance through control of the pressure and current density profiles on the EAST tokamak. Several electron cyclotron emission (ECE) diagnostics are under development as important components of the research program on EAST. The smaller HT-7 tokamak is equipped with a multichannel superheterodyne radiometer and an ECE imaging system. Physics issues including fluctuations driven by electron and ion modes, low frequency zonal flows, magnetic reconnection mechanisms, etc. were investigated on HT-7 using these two systems, which have been moved to EAST after some modifications. New systems, including a 32-channel ECE system and an ECE imaging system of 24(radial) × 16(vertical) channels, are under development. These new systems are designed for the ECH plasma regimes and provide long-range correlation measurements of plasma turbulence. A grating polychromator ECE system has been installed for measurement of the Te profile covering the whole operational range of toroidal magnetic field on EAST.