The rapid industrialization and urbanization along with the economic development of China since the 1980s have been profoundly altering land use pattern in China and subsequently affecting regional and national ecological and environmental conditions. Under the guidance of Shupeng Chen, since 1992 the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has established a complete framework for remote sensing-based land use change monitoring and data analyses, as well as a unique classification system, which has laid the foundation for China's Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) information platform. Firstly, this paper systematically described the history of the LUCC studies in CAS, which include three phases: (1) 1992-1995: Establishment of remote sensing platform for National LUCC Monitoring System. In this phase, CAS designed a land classification system, and built the national-scalemonitoring platform for land use interpretation, by using 30 m optical remote sensing data as inputs. (2) 1996-2005: Standardization and operation of National LUCC Monitoring System. The three national satellite image and landuse map databases in the late 1980s, 1995 and 2000 covering the country were built with the National LUCC Monitoring System. (3) 2005-present: Multidisciplinary applications of land use changes results according to the National LUCC Monitoring System. In this phase, the multiple serial land use maps were widely used in various fields, e.g., the driving mechanism of agricultural reclamation and ecological conversion of farmland, and the system provided scientific support for the national ecological protection and sustainable development. Secondly, we proposed key scientific questions in the field of China's LUCC studies: What is the major spatiotemporal process of LUCC in China and even the world since the era of industrialization? What are the combined effects of LUCC and climate change on the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems? How to treat the land system science as a multidisciplinary solution for sustainability? Thirdly, we also summarized the achievements of recent LUCC researches in the past 10 years, including different topics ranging from land use dynamic models, process and driving mechanism of land use/cover changes, improved land use change detection based on integration of big earth data and cloud computingtechnology, regional climatic and ecological consequences of urban, agricultural and forest land use changes. Finally, potential new directions of LUCC research are discussed from the perspectives of the scientific and technological frontiers. The LUCC research expect to provide important scientific supports for China to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the future.