Rapid land use change has taken place in many coastal regions of China such as the Zhujiang Delta over the past
two decades due to accelerated industrialization and urbanization. In this paper, land use change dynamics were
investigated by the combined use of satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and stochastic
modelling technologies. The results indicated that there has been a notable and uneven urban growth and a tremendous
loss in cropland between 1989 and 1997. The land use change process has shown no sign of becoming stable. The
study demonstrates that the integration of satellite remote sensing and GIS was an effective approach for analyzing the
direction, rate, and spatial pattern of land use change. The further integration of these two technologies with Markov
modelling was found to be beneficial in describing and analyzing land use change process.