Amid the accelerating agenda of Chinese-style modernization, China’s territorial spatial planning is undergoing a major transition and facing mounting challenges, while the theoretical foundations that support this transition remain at an early stage and require further integration. Drawing on holism, this paper operationalizes a cognition–relation–testing governance chain and develops an analytical framework to explain the institutional evolution and governance performance of China’s territorial spatial planning. Using clause- and paragraph-level evidence units from policy and planning texts, the study reviews and compares five historical stages of China’s territorial spatial planning, emphasizing simultaneous consistency across the three levels and a replicable diagnostic procedure. Building on this analysis, the paper proposes a holistic coordination pathway oriented toward modernization governance: it anchors implementation in auditable trade-off rules and executable boundary instruments, strengthens collaboration and conflict-adjudication procedures, and embeds a closed loop of “evaluation–adjustment–accountability” across the full planning life cycle, thereby providing an analytical approach and indicator toolkit for assessing the degree of governance closure in planning practice.
Hong et al. (Fri,) studied this question.