In the context of high-quality development, new quality productive forces have become an important driving force for Chinese-style modernization. The essence of new quality productive forces lies in contemporary advanced productive forces, and high-quality development requires new quality productive forces as both a practical and theoretical guide. Research on the spatial differentiation patterns, fractal dimension barriers, and influencing factors of new quality productive forces can deepen the understanding of new quality productive forces, providing theoretical support for spatial development, barrier removal, and government regulation of new quality productive forces. It is of great significance for accelerating the formation of new quality productive forces in Chinese cities and promoting high-quality economic and social development. The development of new quality productive forces is inseparable from the industrial chain, innovation chain, talent chain, and financial chain, and the cultivation of new quality productive forces is intrinsically consistent with the integration of these four chains. This paper utilizes panel data from 2011 to 2021 for Chinese cities, constructing an evaluation index system for urban new quality productive forces based on the perspective of four-chain integration. Using the entropy method, it measures the level of new quality productive forces in Chinese cities, analyzes the spatial differentiation through spatial trend surfaces and emerging spatiotemporal cold and hot spots, identifies the barrier dimensions affecting the enhancement of new quality productive forces, and employs the geographic detector method to investigate factors influencing the distribution of new quality productive forces. The results indicate the following: First, there is a significant polarization phenomenon in the levels of new quality productive forces among Chinese cities, though this trend weakens over time with a general upward trajectory. High-value areas are concentrated in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Pearl River Delta, and the Yangtze River Delta, with increasing clustering. Second, the development of new quality productive forces in Chinese cities has generally been hindered, but conditions have significantly improved over time, with a clear trend of reduced barriers. Among the probabilities of all barriers, industrial barriers > financial barriers > technological barriers > educational barriers, with four-dimensional barriers being the most likely combination. Third, in terms of the influencing factors of new quality productive forces, social factors have a stronger explanatory power compared to natural factors; however, natural factors can interact with social factors to jointly influence the spatial distribution of new quality productive forces. The potential innovations of this paper include: First, the construction of a new quality productive force index system based on the perspective of four-chain integration, providing a new perspective for measuring new quality productive forces; second, the measurement and analysis of the spatiotemporal differentiation of new quality productive forces at the urban level, expanding the research scale of new quality productive forces; and third, the identification and diagnosis of internal barrier dimensions affecting the improvement of new quality productive forces from the perspectives of industry, technology, education, and finance, as well as the exploration of external influencing factors from natural and social dimensions, providing empirical evidence for the formation of new quality productive forces.