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The unprecedented urban economic growth in China has created a huge demand for urban land. Built upon the standard monocentric city model, this empirical study investigates the determinants of urban spatial scale of Chinese cities using a cross-sectional dataset from 650 Chinese cities. The estimates are surprisingly similar to those found for US cities, with four basic factors (population, income, commuting cost and price of rural land) explaining most of the variation in urban spatial scale of Chinese cities. The findings clearly show that although land use in Chinese cities may have inherited many centrally planned features, market forces today exert a very significant influence. The study also shows that the urban spatial scale of Chinese cities is better understood by a model that consolidates features of both ‘closed’ and ‘open’ cities proposed in the standard urban land economics literature.

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