With the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization, land exploitation in China has caused a decrease of cultivated land, posing a threat to national food security. To achieve the goals of both economic development and cultivated land protection, China launched an urban–rural land replacement measure supported by a new land use policy of “increasing vs. decreasing balance” of construction land between urban and rural areas in 2008. Setting China’s urban and rural land use policies in a historical context and urban–rural sustainable development, this paper discusses four practices in Jiangsu Province, Tianjin Municipality, Shandong Province, and Chongqing Municipality. These practices achieved success in impelling agricultural modernization development, improving rural infrastructure and living circumstances, releasing the potential of rural land resources, and increasing cultivated land and urban construction land in the past decade. However, in some practices, problems, and even some conflicts, exist in the protection of farmers’ rights and interests. These challenges are discussed in the context of implementation. In order to better implement urban–rural construction land replacement and achieve better results, the authors argue that farmers’ rights and interests must always be put first and their wishes should be respected more, a consolidated urban–rural land market and a better land market mechanism should be founded, the supply of public goods and services for villagers should be further improved, and supervision and evaluation mechanisms should be further strengthened.

Although much research has been devoted to urbanization and city growth, urban dynamics also include city decay and renewal. Extant theories and models have been developed to explain these dynamics. They do not, however, fit the experience of China’s “ghost cities”. These cities have been characterized as state-built but minimally inhabited, testimony to planning failure by the monolithic Chinese state. The goal of the article is to provide in-depth insights to China’s ghost city phenomenon and its effects to residents from local stakeholders’ perspectives. A review of Shandong’s new Yintan city reveals many ghost city attributes, but its development trajectory was at odds with this stereotype. Yintan’s lack of success was attributable to too little, not too much, state intervention, reflecting limited state capacity to develop and manage the new city by Rushan, the nearby small city seeking to capitalize on the central government’s development imperatives. These distinctive features notwithstanding, generic key drivers of city growth can help explain Yintan’s lack of development, in a sense, reconciling the city’s experience with extant research elsewhere.

The Rice–Fish Symbiotic System in the Longxian village is the first Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) in Asia. This paper examined the value transformation mechanism of the Longxian Rice–Fish Symbiotic System from the micro perspective of material cycle and energy flow and quantified its economic value using the gross ecosystem product (GEP). Using the InVEST model and ArcGIS tools, the GEP was estimated to be approximately CNY 116.51 million (approx. CNY 252,624 per hectare per year). The ecosystem regulating service value occupied more than 80% of the GEP. Within the regulating ecosystem services, the climate regulation value was the highest (CNY 55.72 million) followed by flood storage value (CNY 32.77 million). These two categories contributed 94.44% of the total value of regulating ecosystem services. The paper recommends employing GEP to evaluate the value of commodities and services provided by an ecosystem. The methodology and approach of the research can serve as an important reference for other GIAHS programs and provides a scientific and rigorous framework for accessing the economic value of agricultural heritage systems.