Examining land use transition is a new way of building on the comprehensive research on Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC). Research on transition law and characteristics is important for improving the theory of land use transition and the practice of land resource management, and for being able to provide a basis and reference for promoting socio-economic transformation. Based on the relevant statistical data concerning cultivated land use in the Huaibei area of the Jiangsu Province from 1995 to 2020, and by understanding the county as a unit to be measured, this paper constructed a multi-dimensional (economic–social–ecological) functional index system of recessive morphology, analyzed the spatio-temporal pattern of the transition of cultivated land use, identified transition point mutations, and established the transition mode by adopting multi-dimensional time series point mutation detection and the piecewise linear regression method. The findings suggest that the index of recessive cultivated land use morphology in the Huaibei region of the Jiangsu Province presents a trend of “slow decline to significant growth to stable growth”. Moreover, the index presented evolutionary characteristics such as “high in the middle and east while low in the west”, as well as “the relatively balanced distribution between counties”, thus indicating that the degree of transition deepened, it showed a homogeneous development trend, and the transition process presented obvious “ladder” stage characteristics; therefore, the authors suggest making scientific use of cultivated land resources, in accordance with local conditions, in order to make the land use transition of cultivated land efficient, green, and sustainable.

Understanding the impact of the three pilot reforms of the rural land system (TRRLS) on rural residential land use transition (RRLUT) based on the land use transition (LUT) theory is crucial for promoting rural land system reform. However, there is still a lack of research on this, and the LUT theory also needs to be improved from a systematic perspective to eliminate the misunderstanding of LUT in academia. To address this, this study firstly attempts to deepen the conceptual model and the understanding of characteristics of LUT from a regime shifts perspective. LUT is the transformation of the land use system as one regime passes into another, where a difference in the analytical perspective of land use morphology generates different transition results. The process of LUT can simultaneously or solely involve dominant morphology and recessive morphology transitions, and there are two types of LUT: positive and negative transitions. Moreover, LUT in different regions may have pathway differences and the convergence of results. Then, a theoretical analysis framework of the pathways of RRLUT under the TRRLS is constructed to detect the impact mechanism by using Wujin district, China to obtain empirical evidence. The results reveal that the recessive morphology transition of rural residential land in Wujin under the TRRLS is significant, while the dominant morphology transition in land quantity structure and spatial distribution is relatively slow. Furthermore, two internal factors of population urbanization and migration, the demand for rural collective economic development, as well as the two external factors of the TRRLS and market factors, such as nonlocals’ demand for housing and rural enterprises’ demand for land, have, to a certain extent, weakened the resilience of the rural land use system and promoted RRLUT. Here, the TRRLS have, by removing the institutional barrier to RRLUT, become the key to the transition.