In this article I examine the politics of urban land development in large Chinese municipalities in the 1990s and 2000s. I find that under the state land tenure and socialist legacy, China's urban land lease markets have evolved around two sets of state players: municipal governments and socialist land masters. In their competition for urban land control, municipal leaders' success depends on their political capacity to deal with socialist land masters from above, their organizational capacity to discipline the fragmented sub-municipal units from within to achieve accumulation, and their moral capacity as social protectors and market regulators to maintain legitimacy. In this process, municipal leaders face the challenges and opportunities to define and defend the boundaries of their territorial power, which is not predetermined by the grand scheme of decentralization policies.