Urban and Rural Land Use Planning Evolution in Modern China from the Perspective of Land Management System

As the carrier of all living and production activities, land is the basic object and land use is the essential content of a variety of planning. Land management system directly determines a series of significant issues such as the supply of urban and rural construction land, the land use efficiency, the allocation of land value appreciation, and so on. Therefore, it influences the philosophy and implementation of planning. In China, there are diverse plans of urban and rural land use managed by multiple agencies. In the early years after the foundation of the PRC, land was allocated by plans with no charge. After the Reform and Openingup, paid use of land and land market was introduced, followed up by the establishment of a land use planning system including territorial planning, urban and rural planning, and land use planning. Recently, exploration of building a unified territorial/spatial planning system is undergoing since the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee. The evolution of planning manifests the modernization of state governance system, from direct control of land by the state, to the decentralized management of development rights under the separation of land ownership and use rights, to the central-local two-layer management of land development rights in the context of protecting resources and environment, all the way to the unified management of land development rights under the Ecological Civilization. On the basis of reviewing the evolution of urban and rural land use planning in the past 70 years, this paper explores the reforms of the land management system with Chinese characteristics and their impacts on urban and rural land use planning. This paper explains the evolution path of urban and rural land use planning and interprets the transition of planning focus of “construction management—asset management—resource management—ecology management”, as well as the corresponding streamlining process of governments functions.