Urbanization is nowadays a global issue, and the encroachment of urban on non-urban land, especially arable land, has become a common phenomenon in most developing countries. For instance, Chinese coastal zone has witnessed incredibly rapid urban and industrial development since 1978.In order to explore the urbanization progress of China, the paper utilized an interactive visual interpretation method and dynamic coding method to discuss urban sprawl and its impact on land use changes in specific Chinese coastal cities from 1979 to 2013.The results clearly demonstrated that urban built-up area sprawl was at a high speed in the main coastal cities of China, with the consumption of cultivated land, non-urban built-up land, wood land and sea.