While urbanization has accelerated, the rural population in China has started decreasing in recent years. However, the expansion
of rural settlement has not been sufficiently curbed. The questions of why this has happened and who has driven the land-use
change (LUC) of rural settlement in China have aroused great interests among researchers. In this paper, it is suggested that population
is not always a positive driving force for the LUC of rural settlement in China. Furthermore, socio-economic driving forces other than
urbanization, population and industrialization are analyzed. On a national scale, the major driving forces are the per-capita rural housing
area and the cultivated land area. On a regional scale, the main driving forces in the eastern China are the house-building capacity of
rural households and the per-capita rural housing area; while in the central China, the main driving forces are rural housing investment,
the proportion of primary industry employees in the rural working population, and the cultivated land area. For the western China, the
main driving forces are rural register population and cultivated land area.