This paper analyzes the pattern of land use in China by GIS to reveal the factors that determine the distribution of the different land use types. Firstly correlation and regression analyses were used to identify the major explanatory variables from a large set of candidate determining factors. We found that the distribution of all the land use types in China was best described by a combination of different biophysical and socio-economic factors. The distribution of different crop types was closely related to climatic differences over the country. Emphasis was placed on the influence of the scale of analysis on the results of the study. On the basis of all these correlation and regression analyses, a multi-scale spatial analysis by GIS modeling on the distribution of different land use types has been carried out. Both resolution of the data and the extent of the study area influenced the revealed relations. The systematic and quantitative characterization of the land use distribution presented in this paper can be used in spatially explicit land use models.