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The spatiotemporal pattern of gradual institutional transformation since 1978 has formed a model of “administrative urbanization” and driven the progress of restructuring urbanization in China, called Chinese-style urban spatial restructuring (USR). The USR exhibits apparent path dependencies and lock-ins, and so needs to be understood within a comprehensive historical context. In China, USR is an institutional progressive system formed under a myriad of complicated driving forces, such as less Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and more SOEs–SCs–NWUs referring to state-owned enterprises, shareholding cooperatives dominated by government, and non-produced work-units in inland. Therefore, USR needs to be clearly analyzed in order to understand the spatiotemporal urbanization. This paper makes two arguments, the first being that even in light of recent trends towards strong local authority, USR is still dominated by the central government party. Secondly, we developed a model that identifies the path-dependency of SOEs–SCs–NWUs' location and relocation, state's institutional reform, and actor (re)locating-led lock-ins and regionally gradient lock-ins from the process of USR for Lanzhou, China, which is one of the largest inland cities in the country. Given USR of coastal cities is more frequently studied, this study provides a key step in understanding the role of local and central government agencies in USR of China's large inland cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]