ABSTRACT Although the growth in developing countries have always been accompanied by large‐scale land expropriation, whether there is a standard relationship between the scale of land expropriation and the stage of economic development remains unclear. This paper aims to explore the practice of land expropriation in China, and while there are polarized views around its role in economic growth, inter‐provincial differences also mean that it is an excellent sample for clarifying the relationship. By exploring the growth coalition consisting of local bureaucracies, central government and peasants within the land‐centered development model, the possible inverted U‐shaped trend of land expropriation scale with economic development is theoretically analyzed, from which hypotheses on the Land‐expropriation Kuznets Curve (LKC) are proposed. Further, using Chinese provincial panel data, the results not only show the invert‐U shaped relationship between economic development and land expropriation and its regional heterogeneity, but also identify four determinants of dependence on land expropriation: internal demands of local bureaucracies to advance urban infrastructure, real estate and manufacturing sectors, horizontal competition among local bureaucracies, vertical supervision by the central government, and external forces from peasants. These conditions combine to expand the scale of land expropriation in the less developed period, leading to the phenomenon of land expropriation dependence. However, with the transformation of China's economic growth and development model, changes in above‐mentioned various conditions have made it possible to reduce land expropriation dependence, and the reduction typically occurs when GDP per capita exceeds 50,000 RMB. This paper provides a new perspective for understanding China's land‐centered development story based on the Growth Machine Theory and generates policy implications for the land management practices in other developing countries.