Encountering the articulation of the strongness of local authorities and market forces in China’s development, attention has been paid to the changing central state which recentralised the regulation capability of localities which has more discretional power on resources utilisation, land for example, in the post-reform era. Yet it is still not clear-cut what drives the state rescaling in terms of land governance and by what ways. After dissecting the evolving policies and practices of construction land supply in China with the focus on the roles of state, we draw two main conclusions.

Land use and land cover (LULC) change influences many issues such as the climate, ecological environment, and economy. In this study, the LULC transitions in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) were analyzed based on the GlobeLand30 land use data in 2000, 2010, and 2020. The intensity analysis method with hypothetical errors calculation was used, which could explain the deviations from uniform land changes. The strength of the evidence for the deviation was revealed even though the confusion matrixes of the LULC data at each time point for the YRB were unavailable.

Since the advent of the second digital revolution, the exponential advancement of technology is shaping a world with new social, economic, political, technological, and legal circumstances. The consequential disruptions force governments and societies to seek ways for their cities to become more humane, ethical, inclusive, intelligent, and sustainable. In recent years, the concept of City-as-a-Platform was coined with the hope of providing an innovative approach for addressing the aforementioned disruptions.