Abstract: The transition of cultivated land use has led to the simultaneous existence of cultivated land intensification and marginalization in China. Two-way change can also cause the intensity differentiation of cultivated land use in recent years. The purpose of this study is to clarify the differentiation characteristics of cultivated land-use intensity under both arable land marginalization and intensification. Firstly, an explanation was made on the intensity differentiation of cultivated land use. Secondly, a model was built to measure the regional differentiation of cultivated land use by the modified coefficient of variation. Thirdly, measurement was carried out for the differentiated changing of cultivated land-use intensity and the influencing factors in China from 2000 to 2014. Results showed that the spatial distribution of cultivated land-use intensity was characterized as 'low in the middle and high around'. There was also a trend of temporal expansion of cultivated land-use intensity at the national and regional scales, while central China showed a trend of spatial contraction. Furthermore, the intensity of cultivated land use presented expansions in most provinces, and contractions in a few provinces in terms of time changing. The differentiation degree of cultivated land use at provincial scale was smaller than that at national and regional scales in terms of spatial variation. There were also significant differences in the cultivated land-use intensity among different provinces. There were more obvious differentiation and expansion characteristics of farm chemicals and chemical fertilizer inputs, indicating that the balance contributed to improving the cultivated land-use intensity. The geographic detector model and Geographically-Weighted Regression (GWR) model were used to estimate the global and local parameters for the influencing factors of regional difference in the intensity index of provincial cultivated land use. It was found that the regional differences of cultivated land-use intensity at provincial scale were dominated mainly by the operation and management factors, such as transfer and area per capita of cultivated land, whereas, a relatively weak influence by the natural conditions, such as cultivated land quality and topographic relief. At the same time, a Moran'I test was performed on the intensity index of cultivated land use in provincial units. It was found that there was a significant spatial correlation in the intensity indexes of cultivated land use among provinces. Then, the GWR revealed that there was more obvious spatial differentiation from the effects of socio-economic conditions than that from the cultivated land management and natural foundation. Correspondingly, there was also a much weaker effect of natural basic conditions on the differentiation of cultivated land-use intensity, than that of cultivated land management and socio-economic conditions on the global and local scales in the geographical detector and GWR. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the control of agricultural infrastructure construction and biochemical inputs, such as pesticides and fertilizers. More importantly, some specific agricultural production factors can also be integrated to constantly improve the land market for the diversified business entities in modern agriculture.