Divergent Land-Use Efficiency in China’s City–Town–Village Hierarchy: Asymmetric Decoupling of Construction Land from Population During 2010–2020

Sustainable settlement governance requires construction land to remain coordinated with population change, as persistent land–population mismatches undermine both resource sustainability and settlement quality, yet much of the land-use efficiency research still treats urban and rural space as a binary system. This study develops a city–town–village framework to examine the divergent evolution of construction land per capita and internal land allocation in 336 prefecture-level units in China from 2010 to 2020. Using national land survey data, population census data, location quotients, exploratory spatial analysis, hierarchical clustering, and regression models, the results indicate pronounced asymmetric decoupling of construction land from population across the settlement hierarchy. City-level land expansion was broadly synchronized with population growth, leaving per capita construction land almost unchanged; towns experienced expansion-driven decoupling as land expansion outpaced population growth; and villages showed severe decoupling: village construction land expanded by 17.6% while the population declined by 23.1%, raising village per capita construction land by 52.9%. At the national level, construction land increased by 24.2% while population grew by only 5.8%. Within prefectures, relative land allocation shifted away from cities and toward villages, with city location quotients declining and village location quotients rising in most prefectures. Regression analysis indicates that physical terrain, development stage, sectoral structure, fiscal expenditure capacity, administrative hierarchy, and regional location are jointly associated with these divergent outcomes. The findings indicate that towns are not simply small cities and that village land stranded by depopulation rather than active sprawl has become a major component of the national land–population imbalance. Policy should therefore extend land-use efficiency governance from metropolitan growth control to differentiated regulation of towns and villages.