Abstract: Fostering modern metropolitan regions is a national strategy. Although metropolitan planning is being advanced rapidly, practice is characterized by multiple coexisting plan types, overlapping content, and persistent implementation difficulties. After systematically reviewing current metropolitan-planning practices in China, this paper draws on international experience and the direction of national planning-system reform to argue that metropolitan planning should be a comprehensive, macro-guiding statutory plan focused on coordination across administrative boundaries and government departments. Its position should be understood within the national planning system: metropolitan plans should be classified as regional plans, jointly prepared by multiple departments, and submitted to the competent higher-level people's government for approval and implementation. Regional planning, represented by metropolitan planning, should implement national spatial strategies, promote coordinated regional development, clarify relationships among plan types, improve the national planning system, strengthen cross-boundary coordination, and support the dynamic maintenance of local plans.