Abstract: China has made great achievements in the process of urbanization but begun to witness the emergence of urban diseases. Faced with the current situation， the Chinese government has taken urban development strategies including limiting the development of big cities and encouraging the development of small ones. From the perspective of urban sprawl， the sprawl indexes of the east， middle and west regions in China and 30 provinces from 1990 to 2010 were calculated. The results showed that the space-driven model is the main type of urban expansion， which proved that there existed urbanization strategy bias in the past. Moreover， the Zipf law was used to examine the overall size distribution system of Chinese cities， which indicated that the current system is comparatively small. Based on the related studies， it was concluded that urban sprawl laws should be adopted， too much government intervention should be avoided and effective inter-city communication channels should be built in taking urban development strategies.

Key words: urban sprawl, urbanization, urban development strategy, Zipf law