Long Hualou

The process and driving forces of rural hollowing in China under rapid urbanization

Rural hollowing is a recent geographic phenomenon that has received significant attention in China, which is experiencing rapid urbanization. It has led to the wasteful use of rural land resources, and imposed obstacles on the optimization of land use and coordinated urban-rural development. Rural hollowing has various forms of manifestation, which refers to the neglect and vacancy of rural dwellings, both of which can lead to damage and ultimate abandonment of rural dwellings. Damaged dwellings have different degrees of destruction, ranging from slight, moderate to severe. The evolutive process of rural hollowing in general has five stages, i.e., emergence, growth, flourishing, stability, and decline. Based on the combination of both regional economic development level and its physiographic features, the types of rural hollowing can be categorised as urban fringe, plain agricultural region, hilly agricultural region, and agro-pastoral region. Especially, the plain agricultural region is the most typical one in rural hollowing, which shows the spatial evolution of rural hollowing as a “poached egg” pattern with a layered hollow core and solid shape. Furthermore, the driving forces behind rural hollowing are identified as the pull of cities and push of rural areas. In particular, this paper identifies contributors to rural hollowing that include rural depopulation in relation to rapid urbanisation and economic change, land ownership and land use policy, and institutional barriers.

Local Responses to Macro Development Policies and Their Effects on Rural System in China's Mountainous Regions: The Case of Shuanghe Village in Sichuan Province

China has promulgated a series of policies including the Western Development Program, the Grain for Green Project, agricultural support policies and building a new countryside strategy to eliminate east-west differences and urban-rural disparities since the late 1990s. This paper gives a holistic examination on local responses to the four typical macro socio-economic development policies and their effects on rural system based on a case study of a mountainous village in southern Sichuan Province. The results showed that the policies have not moved the case study village from its historically marginal status. To some extent, its socio-economic situation might have been worsened by accelerated out-migration of the youth, loss of agricultural land due to afforestation and industrial plants, increased fire hazard due to afforestation and reforestation, increased environmental pollution due to industrial enterprises attracted to the village and a steep decline in agricultural production due to loss of and inefficient use of cultivated land. Factors causing local villages’ dilemmas include the nonuniformity of actors’ objectives, finiteness of villagers’ abilities, and the imperfect incentive and restraint mechanism for local government’s activities under existing policy framework composed of uncoordinated one-size-fits-all policies. We suggest that China’s rural policy in the new period should gradually shift from a sectoral to a place-based one, from top-down incentives to the development of bottom-up projects, and fully recognize the diversity of rural space, so as to lift local capacities and make good use of the knowledge shared by different actors. Moreover, it is also necessary to integrate the various sectoral policies, and improve the interministerial and interdepartmental coordination of rural policies at regional and local levels.

Rural restructuring in China: Theory, approaches and research prospect

Rural restructuring is a process of reshaping socio-economic morphology and spatial pattern in rural territory in response to the changes of elements both in kernel system and external system of rural development, by optimally allocating and efficiently managing the material and non-material elements in the two systems. It aims at ultimately optimizing the structure and promoting the function within rural territorial system as well as realizing the coordination of structure and complementation of function between urban and rural territorial system. This paper establishes a theoretical framework of rural restructuring through elaborating the concept and connotations as well as analyzing the mechanism pushing forward rural restructuring based on the evolution of “elements-structure-function”, and probes the approaches from the three aspects of spatial restructuring, economic restructuring and social restructuring. Besides, the authors argue that the study of rural restructuring in China in the future needs to focus on the aspects of long-term and multi-scale process and pattern, mechanism, regional models, rural planning technology system and standard, policy and institutional innovations concerning rural restructuring as well as the impacts of globalization on rural restructuring, in order to serve the current national strategic demands and cope with the changes of rural development elements in the process of urban-rural development transformation.