The goals of constantly optimizing the pattern of national spatial development and constructing an ecological civilization were proposed at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2017. The document stated that the state had upgraded the optimization of patterns of spatial development to the national strategic level, and considered it an important foundation for ecological civilization construction (
Huang et al., 2015). Through spatial planning and controlling human activities to promote the coordination of population distribution, economic layout and resources and environmental carrying capacity—in other words, the guidelines of the blueprint—have become crucial for spatial optimization. The difficulty of “sticking to a single blueprint until the end” lies in the scientific and quantitative depictions of the structure of spatial development (
Fan, 2018). Most scholars in China and abroad have studied quantitative depictions following two research paradigms. From the perspective of development, they have developed “point-axis-area” development projects to promote economic growth by characterizing regional functions and spatial structures under interregional interactions (
Zhou et al., 2015;
Bradburd et al., 2016). This also serves the interests of planning for national economic development and implementing the relevant policies at the spatiotemporal scale, and promotes orderly urban spatial expansion (
Todes, 2017;
Chen et al, 2018). From the perspective of protection, researchers have assessed the spatiotemporal pattern, process, and mechanism of regional landscape ecology for ecological conservation, and have highlighted the patterns of ecological security as a means of alleviating the contradiction between ecological protection and economic development to protect the ecological space (
Ferretti and Pomarico, 2013;
Correa Ayram et al., 2016;
Nunes et al., 2019). Based on the “point-axis” theoretical framework, the central points, axes of development, and core areas of land space were measured and portrayed. The most widely used methods are spatial clustering and kernel density analysis (
Vasanen, 2012;
Veneri, 2013;
Yu et al., 2014). Another method involves identifying the ecological sources, corridors, and patches at all levels using theories on the patterns of ecological security of land space to develop systematic patterns. Commonly used methods for the network analysis of minimum paths include redundancy analysis, circuit theory, random walk theory, minimum cumulative resistance (MCR), and the cost distance model (
Blazquez-Cabrera et al., 2016;
Luo et al., 2018;
Li et al., 2019). Regardless of the perspectives of development or protection, the purpose of the existing research is to use a single goal as the direction of space management (
Peng et al., 2015;
Jin et al., 2019), ignoring the mutual competition and synergy within various land spaces. Few studies have incorporated agricultural space into the research framework of competition for land use and the relevant trade-offs.
