The author reviews the development process of territorial planning since the 1980s in China. According to statistical data, up to 1993,30 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities), 223 cities and 640 counties had accomplished the compilationof territorial planning. In this process, the functions of "authority, decision making and service" were fully brought into play to serve the compilationof regional economic social developmentplanning. Meanwhile, the principle of "from top to bottom, from bottom to top" was followed in combination with that of "leaders, local operators and experts", and made a point of the study of basic theories. However, some problems were also revealed, i.e., the features of territorial planning are not distinct, having many similarities withregional economic social development planning; the planned economy still played an important role; the maneuverabilityof planning was not good; and the qualitative analysis was not so closely combined with quantitative research. Aiming at the current situations of economic globalization and informalization,China's Accession to the World Trade Organization, and the improvement of socialist market economic system, the paper puts forward basic thought to promote the new roundterritorial planning and accomplish four changes as follows: to change planned type to market and guidancetypes; to change resources exploitationand utilizationto integration of resource exploitation, utilizationand conservation; mono goal for economic development to multi goal for sustainable development which should coordinate economy,society,population,resources and environment;and to change planning focus from industrial planning to spatial locational planning that coordinates regional economic social construction.Based on the above thoughts, the improving waysare proposed, including: importanceshould be attachedtothe inter provincial territorial planning or trans urban and trans prefectural territorial planning of a province; the land use planning should be the core of basicterritorial planning; spatial policyresearch in cooperation with territorial planning should be strengthened; planning method should be evolved toward informalization and scientization; legislation of territorial planning should be formulated as soon as possible; and publicparticipation should be widely admitted in the process of planning.