This study aims to identify the mechanisms through which land tenure governance affects grain efficiency in an integrated framework and to examine the impacts of the public governance, village self-governance, and relational governance of land tenure on the technical efficiency of contracted land and rented-in land. Farm level survey data collected from Liaoning, Jiangxi, and Jiangsu provinces covering the years of 2014 and 2015 is used for the empirical analysis. The findings indicate that (i) public governance associated with land certification significantly increases the technical efficiency of grain production; (ii) village self-governance and administrative land reallocations can serve as substitutes for the land rental market in optimizing the distribution of land resources and improving technical efficiency; and (iii) compared to multi-year transfer contracts, both annual and open-ended transfer contracts have negative impacts on technical efficiency. Keywords: land tenure governance, tenure security, technical efficiency, China Acknowledgement : Financial support for this paper has been gratefully received from the Natural Science Foundation of China (71373127, 71573134, 71773054 and 71603121) and the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (2016M601839).