Navigate China's territorial spatial planning ecosystem
A curated directory of official portals, standards platforms, geospatial data, professional tools, and the best Chinese planning websites — everything you need to understand and work with China's planning system.
Six doors into China's planning world
Start with these
The resources our editors reach for most often.
The featured Chinese portal: planning news, document library, Q&A community, and an AI knowledge base that answers with cited sources.
The ministry that oversees China's territorial spatial planning system — policies, approved plans, and technical guidelines.
China's national geospatial public platform — authoritative basemaps, imagery, and place search for the whole country.
Search every current and draft natural-resources standard, download full texts, and track what is being revised.
The open-source GIS workhorse: free, multilingual, and widely used for planning analysis and cartography.
China's leading domestic GIS platform, common in government planning information systems.
What is territorial spatial planning in China?
Since 2018, China has merged its formerly fragmented regimes — main-functional-zone plans, land-use plans, and urban–rural plans — into a single territorial spatial planning system (国土空间规划). The framework is organized as "five levels" (national, provincial, municipal, county, township) and "three types" (master plans, special plans, and detailed plans), all supervised by the Ministry of Natural Resources.
For international researchers and consultants, the challenge is rarely the concepts — it is finding the right authoritative sources in a bilingual information environment. That is exactly the gap this directory fills: every entry below is hand-checked, described in plain English, and tagged by type.
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