The territorial planning and governance of river basin is an important issue in achieving highquality development of the basin. As a crucial component of national land space, the high-quality development of watersheds aligns intrinsically with the construction of spatial governance systems. Watersheds have become essential units for advancing the modernization of the national governance system. The establishment of the national spatial planning system offers an opportunity to reshape the spatial order of river basin governance, presenting new propositions and higher standards for watershed planning and management. The development of watersheds necessitates maximizing comprehensive benefits, with coordination, stability, and sustainability as core elements. Drawing from global experiences, comprehensive watershed planning emerges as a vital tool to ensure effective and favorable watershed governance development. However, China’s current watershed planning and governance encounter issues such as management fragmentation, system disconnection, outdated methods, and unclear boundaries. Addressing how to allocate resources, optimize planning systems comprehensively, and collaborate with a wide array of stakeholders to implement development concepts and governance goals is crucial. This approach aims to scientifically plan the ecological protection and high-quality development of watersheds, making it an urgent concern in watershed spatial governance. This paper first briefly reviews and reflects on the development process of river governance in China. China’s integrated watershed management is continually innovating and has undergone four main periods since the founding of New China: the development of traditional water conservancy, the advancement of water-related projects, integrated watershed management, and the concept of a life community encompassing mountains, waters, forests, fields, lakes, and grasses.At present, watershed planning and governance are characterized by three main problems. The first is the weak coordination of regional-element. The parallelism of water function areas and basin control units creates obstacles to regionalelement integration. The second problem is the loose articulation of affairs and functions. The connection of authority and function is essential for implementing river basin planning, but currently, there are issues both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, the synergy of the basin governance system is weak. Vertically, the interaction between the central government and local governments is inadequate. The third issue is the insufficient respect for development laws. On the one hand, there is a lack of understanding of the spatial layout laws of the watershed in plan preparation. On the other hand, the assessment of administrative region divisions tends to emphasize short-term interests over overall protection. To address the above issues, this study briefly introduces the practices of comprehensive river basin planning in the United States, Finland, and Australia, drawing advanced experiences from three aspects: use control guiding spatial strategy, policy authority combined with tool science, and organizational coordination ensuring decisional adaptation. Thestudy also points out that the applicability of this experience to China is reflected in three aspects: a use-oriented strategy guarantees the value of the planning intention, policy combination tools enhance the seriousness of the planning process, and organizational guarantee decision-making strengthens the articulation and coordination of planning and implementation.Finally, in combination with the construction of the territorial planning system and the modernization reform trend of the governance capacity, four ideas of innovating and improving the territorial planning and governance of river basin are proposed. The first idea is matching resource endowment with functional positioning. The functional positioning of watershed spaces should align with their resource endowment, and the goals and paths of watershed planning should be guided by the designated use of these elements. The second idea is integrating spatial authority and the planning system. This involves promoting high-level management of comprehensive planning, formulating the outline of basin law and development planning as the top-level design, and preparing special plans related to basin land and spatial planning. The third idea is giving equal emphasis to flexible decisionmaking. A multilevel, multiagency, and multisectoral coordination and safeguard mechanism should be established to encourage the involvement of multidimensional planning values and the enrichment of local informal complementary tools. The fourth idea is cross-border tradeoff and synchronizing dynamic assessment and information management. This involves strengthening the impact assessment and dynamic adjustment mechanisms for planning, design, and construction operations to enhance the effectiveness of watershed planning and management. In the future, watershed territorial spatial planning should seize the opportunity of systemic reform and construct a watershed territorial spatial planning governance system and methodology with Chinese characteristics that meet actual governance needs and support the system of territorial spatial development and protection in the new era.