Land Governance and Urban Hierarchy in China: Local Land Allocation Under Centralized Land Regulation

China’s urban size distribution has increasingly shifted toward concentration in large cities amid global urbanization and the restructuring of urban development patterns. This trend has intensified governance and spatial pressures in major cities while exposing weaker growth momentum in small and medium-sized cities and reducing overall urban system coordination. Existing studies mainly explain this pattern through market forces such as agglomeration economies, housing prices, and migration, while others examine the consequences of local land practices from the perspectives of land finance, local competition, and institutional change. However, there is still no systematic explanation of why centrally imposed aggregate land constraints, operating through heterogeneous local land allocation, generate uneven urban outcomes. Against the background of the 2004 strict land management reform, this paper develops a theory-oriented conceptual framework linking central land constraints, local land allocation, and urban size structure. It clarifies how uniform central constraints may be translated into uneven urban outcomes through differentiated local land-allocation practices. Local land allocation is identified as the key transmission mechanism through which development opportunities are reshaped across cities and, under specific institutional conditions, the upper tiers of the urban hierarchy are reinforced. This paper therefore offers a bounded explanation of how central–local land governance shapes China’s urban size structure, while also underscoring the relevance of land governance to more balanced, resource-efficient, and sustainable urban development.