Studies of cultivated land change in China have long been hampered by the lack of accurate and reliable data since 1949.By analyzing the cultivated land data from different sources in different phases after 1949,the paper considers the statistics with more errors happens during 1960-1985.According to the systematic data on land use gathered in the 1996 survey,based on reverse deduction of the cultivated land area from 1986 to 1996,and deduction of the cultivated land area from 1960 to 1985 by stages by employing yield of grain,this paper redescribed the actual changing trend and character of Chinese cultivated land and analyzed the driving force of the policy relative to cultivated land to cultivated land area change.The result indicated that the Chinese cultivated land amount has been fluctuating since the founding of New China in 1949.It increased as a whole before 1979,and decreased slowly since the 1980s.The cultivated land amount decreased rapidly after 1999 because of cultivated land conversion into land for ecological purpose,hence the problems of grain security and cultivated land security result from which need to be paid more attention to.In future,the pace of ecological cultivated land conversion will be slowed down gradually after a fast ecological rescue phase,the grain security and cultivated land security will become the main influencing factors which affect changes of Chinese cultivated land amount.With the strict implementation of cultivated land protecting policy,the Chinese cultivated land amount will keep steady after 2010.