The Changjiang River Delta coastal zone is a typical region where global change and human activities interact violently. Under the background of deepening coastal development and policy boosting, land use changes in this region has intensified, and it has become a conflict hotspot between economic development and ecological protection. The evolution analysis of land use pattern is of great significance to promote the coastal development zone of the Changjiang River Delta. The article is based on 5 issues of land use vector data during 1980 to 2018, by using Sankey diagram, annual change rate, dynamic degree and nuclear density analysis method to reveals the evolution characteristics of land use in the Changjiang River Delta coastal zone in the past 39 years in terms of quantitative structure, spatial agglomeration of key land types, and the rule of sea-land gradient variation. The results are as follows: (1) The basement landscape of the Changjiang River Delta coastal zone in 2018 is composed by cultivated land, forest land and construction land, which occupies 89.86% of the total study area. In spatial pattern, it presents cultivated land in the north and woodland in the south and construction land is scattered and embedded in it. (2) In the past 39 years, the land use system in the study area has varied in quantitative structure and spatial pattern. Among them, in the overall presentation of quantity structure, the cultivated land continued to decline steadily, construction land continues to increase rapidly, forest land fluctuates slightly, and grasslands and waters fluctuate slightly, and the total area which experienced reclamation development reached to 2161.01 square kilometer; In spatial pattern, it mainly shows that construction land patches blooming everywhere and accompanied by local explosive expansion, farmland patches shrink gradually and tend to fragment, and form a distinct wetland landscape in reclamation areas in Jiangsu and eastern Shanghai and Hangzhou Bay. (3) The article focus on the spatial agglomeration analysis on construction land and wetland. Among them, the expansion scale of construction land is small and scattered, and the expansion concentration degree continues to increase, which forms a spatial clustering pattern from "single center" to "multiple center"; The tidal flat resources are characterized by a small number, small patches and scattered distribution, and generally show a decreasing trend. The expand and reduce hotspots in different periods behaves differently in different regions. (4) Within a distance of 20 kilometers from the coastline, the land use dynamics in the study area showed obvious changes of construction land goes to sea and ocean land goes to land, in addition, the dynamics of sea-land gradients of different types in the coastal areas of Jiangsu, Shanghai and Zhejiang are different.