A better understanding of the spatio-temporal characteristics and driving mechanism of population and residential land change in urban and rural China under rapid urbanization and industrialization is the important premise for constituting feasible policy and strategy promoting the farmland protection, urban development and new countryside construction. Based on decoupling theory and model, this paper analyzes the overall trend, coupling types and patterns of China's population and construction land change in urban and rural areas, using urban and rural demographic and land-use data from China Statistics Bureau and the Department of Land and Resources of each province. The results show that, the relationship between urban population and construction land in 25 provinces are weakly decoupled, that is, the growth rate of urban construction land is higher than the growth rate of urban population; while in rural areas, rural residential land expends as rural population decreases. The relationship between urban population and construction land in nearly half of the provinces all over the country are strongly decoupled and that in 11 provinces reflects the phenomenon of recession decoupling, that is, rural residential land change is not coordinated with rural population change in most of the provinces. The relationship between urban-rural population and construction land could be divided into seven types and the relationship in about 1/3 provinces is very uncoordinated. This paper argues that the important reason for the aforementioned problems include three aspects: fiscal and tax systems and the evaluation mechanism for officials being imperfect, poor control of urban and rural planning, and the deep-rooted urban-rural dual system. In the new era, the sustainable approaches to coordinate urban-rural population and construction land changes are: following the objective laws in population, industrial, urban and social development, actively reforming fiscal and tax systems, scientifically defining the urban spatial growth boundary, gradually removing the urban-rural dual system, and orderly promoting urban-rural land integration and replacement.