In 2019 the Communist Party and State Council ordered the establishment of a unified territorial spatial planning (guotu kongjian guihua) system, merging the previously separate urban, land-use and main-functional-zone plans into a single hierarchy under the new Ministry of Natural Resources. It is built around "three zones and three lines", delimiting urban, agricultural and ecological space and fixing urban-growth boundaries, permanent farmland and ecological protection red lines. The reform aimed to end overlapping and conflicting plans. It now governs how every level of government allocates space.
It consolidated China's fragmented plans into one statutory spatial system, hard-coding ecological and farmland limits around urban growth.
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