Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China's macro-level spatial planning has experienced periods of growth, decline, and resurgence. The rise and subsequent abandonment of national land planning in the mid-1980s, the silence throughout the 1990s, the subsequent focus on national-level spatial planning by various ministries in the early twenty-first century, and the formulation of the National Land Spatial Planning Outline under the State Council's institutional reform in 2018 reflect the evolving understanding of the central government's macroeconomic regulation in response to the establishment of a socialist market economy and the continuous advancement of urbanization in China.