Sustainable land use is an important part of sustainable development. China is the largest developing country and has made significant achievements in economic development. However, in the process of development, there are also problems such as tightening resource constraints and intensifying land use conflicts. With mainland China as the research area in this article, the perspective of “production–living–ecological spaces” (PLES) from the administrative unit scale and grid scale was used to build a land use evaluation index system. Through geographic information technology and mathematical models, we researched PLES spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of various Chinese cities, regions, and provinces, and analyzed the present situation of the coupling coordination and drew several conclusions. (1) From 2010–2019, the PLES function scores of cities in China increased to a certain extent, presenting a high spatial distribution pattern in the south and low in the north, and the spatial correlation analysis shows that there is a certain correlation between the land use function scores of each city. (2) From 2010–2019, the spatial suitability of PLES in China showed a downward trend, suggesting that human activities and different land use patterns may have a certain impact on land use suitability. In addition, ecological space suitability is negatively correlated with human production and living activities. (3) The coupling coordination degree of land use in China has been continuously reducing over the past 9 years, indicating that the coordination degree of different land use activities has been continuously deteriorated. There are also some cities with poor PLES coordination, caused by unreasonable production and living activities inflicting great damage upon the ecological space, or by low production efficiency with dense populations. Therefore, it is suggested to reasonably adjust the layout of land space, improve the efficiency of land resource utilization, and pay attention to the harmonious development between humans and nature, so as to achieve the sustainable development of land use. •Multi-scale mathematical and coupling coordination degree model are applied comprehensively.•A complete index system from different scales to evaluate land use sustainability are conducted.•The relationship between PLES and SDGs detailed indicators are analyzed and discussed.