With its focus on the increasingly complicated human-environment relationship under the background of rapid urbanization, rural restructuring study has become an important frontier research area of geography. Rural restructuring is a process of reshaping the socioeconomic forms and spatial patterns in rural areas in respond to the changes of factors both internal and external of the system, by optimally allocating and efficiently managing the material and non-material elements of rural development. It aims at ultimately optimizing the structures and improving the functions within rural territorial systems as well as realizing the structural coordination and functional complementation between urban and rural territorial system. Based on the perspective of "elements-structure-function" of rural territorial system, this article first elaborated the concept of rural restructuring from the aspects of behavioral mainstream, value system, and targets. Then, a framework of rural restructuring mechanism was analyzed, which consisted of inducing mechanism, supporting mechanism, constraining/promoting mechanism, guiding mechanism, and driving mechanism. Furthermore, in view of the guiding role of governments in optimal allocation of critical resources and rural restructuring, this article argued that it is necessary to restructure the contours of state intervention in rural societies and economies. Finally, the research contents of rural restructuring in the future were prospected.
Influenced by the interaction of various internal and external factors including urbanization, informatization, and globalization, rural areas in China are experiencing socioeconomic restructuring, regional function upgrading, and a series of transformations and reconstructions. Rural areas face a range of unprecedented opportunities and challenges, and the proposal of "rural revitalization strategy" puts forward new requirements for rural development and rural geography. Therefore, a comprehensive and systematic understanding of rural space system and accurate depiction of rural space are necessary prerequisites for further studies. Existing Chinese research focused more on the material space and to some extent placed less focus on the study of social-cultural space. Using a single material space view is very difficult to understand and interpret a large number of increasingly complex rural geographical problems. Based on a systematic analysis of the thinking on rural space and development in China and abroad, this article points out the deficiency of Chinese rural geographical research about rural society and culture. This article preliminarily expounds the complexity of rural territorial system and argues that the rural space system that is derived from the rural territorial system should not be limited within the range of rural material space but be understood through the multi-dimensional perspective of space. According to the human-environment system theory, this study tried to construct a rural space system that consists of three progressive layers including material space-social space-cultural space and clarify the connotations of every layer and the logical relations between them to fully understand the increasingly complex rural area. This article also highlights the necessity that multi-dimensional rural spatial restructuring should be developed. Based on the construction of multi-dimensional rural space system, forming an overview of the historical process and realistic situation of rural spatial restructuring and predicting the future path of rural development are very important research tasks to carry out in the future. In the end, this article appeals that Chinese geographers should continue to discuss and analyze concepts of rural issues in order to constantly improve our understanding about the changing countryside, and deepen the studies of rural spatial restructuring by using the theories and methods of related subjects from the perspective of multi-dimensional space. Finally, for the comprehensive empirical research of rural geographical issues, Chinese rural geographers should strengthen micro scale studies, actively devote themselves to field study, be observant of rural daily life, and understand the rural society and culture to make up for the deficiency of Chinese rural geographical research about rural society and culture.
Since the reform and opening up in 1978, human geography in China has experienced important developments. As a branch of human geography, rural geography has carried out a series of research on the rural regional system of human-environment relations. Taking the geography research articles published in the past 40 years in major Chinese journals of geography as the analysis object and using bibliometrics and literature summarization methods assisted by Citespace tools, this study identified the key research areas, divided the themes into stages, and summarized progress in the major research areas. The results show that under the background of globalization, urbanization, modernization, and informationization, as well as rural industrial structure adjustment and rural development policy change, great changes have taken place. From 1978 to 2000, rural geography mainly focused on the research themes of rural urbanization, urban-rural relations, village clusters, agricultural development, and rural economy. The academic community showed greater interest in urban than rural research, which has made fundamental and strategic contributions to the agricultural and rural development of the country and regions From 2000 to 2008, rural geography began to shift to topics such as rural tourism, rural settlements, new rural construction, village planning, and hollow village, and the development of the discipline gradually progressed. Since 2008, rural geography has shifted to more diverse topics, mainly including rural transformation, rural restructuring, rurality, rural governance, rural community, and spatial restructuring, which converge with rural geography research internationally. In the future, the research of rural geography in China should be based on the construction of theories and methods of rural geography and serve the rural vitalization strategy. More attention should be paid to the development, transformation, differentiation, restructuring, and governance of rural areas, deepening theoretical research on the value of diversified space in rural areas and developing a theoretical framework and research paradigm of rural geography with unique Chinese characteristics.
Population aging is an important demographic phenomenon for the development of human society. At present, it brings both challenges and opportunities for rural development, thusly calls for systematic studies on its impact on rural development in order to explore appropriate strategies to cope with aging. In this article, the impacts of population aging are analyzed with respect to the changes of rural land use, ecological space, agricultural production, consumption structure, rural governance, and social security, from the ecological, production, and living aspects. On this ground, we propose that rural population aging impact and adaptation research should focus on the environment, economic development, and social development dimensions, combined with the general aims of the national strategy on rural vitalization, including thriving businesses, pleasant living environments, social etiquette and civility, effective governance, and prosperity. In addition, three research fields that are in urgent need of breakthrough are summarized: (1) the impacts of rural population aging on the valuation of ecosystem services and economic benefits from the perspective of population mobility; (2) spatial differentiation of rural population aging and its impacts on agricultural modernization; and (3) rural vitalization pathways to cope with population aging.
Based on a literature review and analysis of the statistics of the World Bank, this study investigated the rural transformation process of the world from the aspects of rural population, employment, grain production, and public services. It revealed that the world has transformed from rural society to urban society and from agriculture-based economy to nonagricultural economy. In this process, the development efficiency and public service quality were improved. The article points out that accompanying the globalization, industrialization, and urbanization processes, rapid rural depopulation exacerbated rural instability and vulnerability and led to rural decline that endangers rural sustainability. It highlights the importance of rural vitalization and calls for ruralization to form the urban-rural regional pattern with urbanization. Scientific planning, relocation, and local stakeholders' bottom-up initiatives must be encouraged. It is also necessary to scientifically govern the world's rural transformation process, identify and develop the rural vitalization growth point, and improve rural resilience.
The change of farming household behaviors is an important driving force for quantitative change or from quantitative to qualitative change of rural production space system. The operation of rural production space system is the external manifestation of farming household behaviors. Examining farming household behaviors can provide some insights for the interpretation of the operational mechanism of rural production space system. Based on a theoretical framework of farming household behavior transformation and the operational response of rural production space system, this study constructed the index system and established a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model from the perspective of farming household behavior transformation, and took Henghe Village of Jiangjin District in Chongqing Municipality as an example to interpret the operational mechanism of rural production space system. The main conclusions are as follows: the behaviors of various farming households effected differently on the operation of rural production space system, among which large agricultural producers showed greater impact than joint agricultural cooperatives, which in turn had greater impact than the traditional households. The impacts of different farming household behaviors on rural production space system operation were different, among which the behaviors of large agricultural producers mainly affected the utilization efficiency of rural production space system; the behaviors of joint agricultural cooperatives clearly improved the economic benefits of rural production space system; and the contribution of traditional household behaviors to the improvement of rural production space system was minimal. This study put forward some suggestions from the perspective of economic, social, and spatial restructuring including developing a variety of moderately large-scale operations, fostering new agricultural management entities and professional farmers, and guiding the input behavior of technology and capital of farming households in order to realize the coordination and balanced development of rural production space system.
The Report of the 19th CPC Congress puts forward the strategy of rural vitalization. The role of human geographers is to participate in various rural vitalization practices and to think of it from the perspective of space and region. David Harvey, a representative of the Marxist geography, pointed out that the phenomenon of time-space compression had aggravated the crisis of capital accumulation. To eliminate the crisis needs the revolution in production modes and production relations. This study used the data of rural investment projects of enterprises in Guangzhou City from 2015 to 2017 published on the Guangdong Provincial Government’s official website, to find out what projects tried to eliminate regional development gaps and resisted the pure pursuit of capital profits. This will provide a basis for the government to target its support. The research method was empirical analysis of the statistical data. The conclusions of this study are as follows. First, the spatial distribution of investment projects indicates that the majority of the investments in the rural vitalization of Guangzhou City from 2015 to 2017 followed the “pure” market principle—the investment projects are mainly in the suburbs close to the central city, and the large-scale investment projects are also concentrated there. This distribution is the result of time-space compression. Second, a small number of the rural investment projects for rural vitalization in Guangzhou City from 2015 to 2017 are not purely pursuing profits. These investment projects are mainly on improving the environmental quality of rural areas, rather than on production. These may be regarded as spatial restoration projects, not for strengthening capital circulation. These investment projects can better reflect people's understanding of the nature of a happy life and have positive meanings.
In the new century, the countryside of China is experiencing a new and vigorous process of transformation and reconstruction and the spatial differentiation of rurality in rural areas can be seen as the concrete manifestation of the process of rural transformation and reconstruction in local areas. Also in this period, rural development has become more pluralistic and more externally dependent and the driving factors are more pluralistic as well. Therefore, a more comprehensive and systematic spatial interface perspective was applied to explore the spatial differentiation of rurality in village areas, which provides a new perspective for the study of rural development in the new era. In this study, we used the rurality index to analyze the spatial differentiation of rurality at the village scale in Gongyi City, Henan Province, China. Next, we quantitatively determined the location of spatial interfaces in Gongyi using the moving split-window technique. Finally, we used a geographical detector technique to assess the mechanisms that influenced the spatial differentiation of rurality at the village scale in Gongyi. Our results show the following: (1) The spatial interface of Gongyi can be divided into natural and human categories. The most important natural interfaces include terrain and natural resources, and the human interfaces include agricultural production, residential, administrative division, and traffic. (2) The distribution of rurality at the village scale in Gongyi showed strong positive spatial autocorrelation. The number of the strong rurality and extremely strong rurality villages was relatively small. The strong rurality and extremely strong rurality villages were mainly distributed in the southern and northwestern regions of Gongyi City. Intermediate rurality villages were mainly distributed in the southwestern, southeastern, and eastern regions of Gongyi City. The weak rurality and extremely weak rurality villages were mainly distributed around the urban region and the two port towns in the west and east of the city. On the whole, spatial agglomeration was evident and it was strong in the periphery and weak in the middle area. (3) Under the influence of the multiple effects of the spatial interfaces, the elements in the county space of Gongyi were reorganized to promote the formation of rurality spatial differentiation. The traffic, administrative division, and residential interfaces strongly affected rurality spatial differentiation, while the natural interfaces played a less important role.
Rural transformation is an important way to achieve sustainable development of rural areas. The establishment of rural transformation path and policy in line with major function-oriented zoning is an important measure to promote the integration of urban and rural development and achieve rural revitalization. Taking Hunan Province, an agricultural region in central China, as an example and based on major function oriented zoning, this study constructed an evaluation index system of rural transformation degree around the core elements including population, land, and industry. We calculated the rural transformation degree of each county during 2006-2011 and 2011-2016, and analyzed the spatial differences and driving mechanisms of rural transformation development in various major function oriented zoning. The results show that the characteristics of rural transformation in different major function oriented zones varied because of factors such as natural condition, location, economic foundation, and policy environment. Rural transformation in prioritized development zones was mainly driven by cities and towns. The role of urban influences, market drivers, and farmers' decision-making power was outstanding. The degree of rural transformation was high and the speed was fast. Rural transformation in main agricultural zones was mainly driven by modern agriculture. Resource support, policy impetus, and cultural embeddedness played a leading role. The degree of rural transformation was relatively high, and the speed was relatively fast. Rural transformation in key ecological function zones was mainly driven by the government. Due to the constraints of topography, economic basis, and resources and the environment, the degree of rural transformation was relatively low, and the speed was relatively slow. The rural transformation degree of all major function orientedzones during 2011 to 2016 was improved compared with that during 2006 to 2011. The major function oriented zoning scheme of Hunan Province reflects the difference of rural development to some extent, but the guiding role of major function-oriented zoning policy in the process of rural transformation development needs to be strengthened.
Under the background of rapid urbanization and rural tourism development, this study explored the characteristics and development mechanism of human settlement change in Lanxi Village, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province from the perspective of living-production-ecological space, which to some extent can reflect the general patterns of traditional village development in China. Based on participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and GIS spatial analysis, this study examined the process, pattern, and mechanism of change of living-production-ecological space of Lanxi Village. The results show that: (1) Through analyzing the system coupling features of traditional villages’ human settlement environment and living-production-ecological space and based on the living-production-ecological space theory, we believe that traditional villages’ human settlement environment should contain livable living space, coordinated production functions, and beautiful ecological space, which accord with the goals and features of living-production-ecological space system. (2) The living space of Lanxi Village transformed from consanguineous concentration to expansion to the periphery; the production space transformed from agricultural function to tourism function; and the ecological space transformed from external overall contraction to patchy distribution. The processes of change of living-production-ecological space were intertwined and interpenetrative. Also living-production-ecological space of Lanxi Village gradually transformed from traditional human settlement space to new multiple use complex space. (3) Change in living-production-ecological space pattern was caused by both internal and external driving factors that include tourism market demand, government policies, spatial behavior transformation, and self-organizing reactions. The internal driving forces focused on the continuation and transformation of living space structural features, while the external driving factors were mainly embodied at the transformation and replacement of production and ecological space structures. Seen from the degree of adaptation to change of Lanxi Village, there are still many problems that remain to be solved. So this article suggests reconstitute the living-production-ecological space and explore sustainable human settlement construction mode of traditional villages.
Spatial network of village and town communities is a spatial organization form that relies on the town and takes the village and town communities as nodes and connections between nodes as edges. Exploring its structural characteristics and optimization strategies is of great significance for guiding the sound flow of factors and improving network operation efficiency. By selecting 19 village and town communities in Fenghuang Town of Shapingba District, Chongqing Municipality as network nodes, this study applied the modified gravitational intensity model to explore the connections between these nodes. Using GIS tools, social network analysis method, and correlation analysis method, this study examined the general characteristics, node characteristics, and characteristics of difference of the spatial network structure of the village and town communities, and established the network optimization strategies. The results show that the spatial network of the village and town communities is in a low level, unbalanced stage of development, which possess characters of both general looseness and local agglomeration, the small world characteristic, and the association difference between cohesive subgroups is significant. The spatial network of the village and town communities exhibited a 3-level node structure that takes the town community as the core, community 5, 7, 4, 10, and 14 as secondary cores, and contains the other communities, among which the structural hole advantage of the core nodes needs further enhancing. Various social attributes of community residents cause different effects to the network structure. On these bases, this study constructed a "one axis, one core, eighteen nodes, one network, and fifty-seven links" spatial network pattern by improving functions of the nodes, building the node hierarchy, and strengthening economic relations among nodes, and therefore providing a demonstration for current and future rural community construction.
Agricultural structure adjustment and upgrading is the main engine of Chinese rural transformation development, while large-scale and specialized production is the direction of such transformation in agriculture internationally. This study took an industrialized transformation county—Gongyi City and an agricultural modernization transformation county—Yanling County as examples, and used location quotient, structural change index, and specialization index, to analyze agricultural structure adjustment and reconstruction of rural landscape on the township level under the background of rural economic transformation. The conclusions are as follows: (1) The interaction between demand-based agricultural structure adjustment and rural transformation comes into being through the modernized change of cultivated land use, the quality improvement of agricultural products, and the multi-functional reconstruction of rural landscape. In the future, large-scale agriculture in grain production and specialized precision agriculture will co-exist in China; (2) Basically non-agricultural transformation and agricultural modernization transformation of rural economy both can bring the large-scale as well as specialized use of rural land and internal structure adjustment of agriculture. The industrialized transformation county takes grain crops as the main agricultural structure adjustment direction, and the county with agricultural modernization transformation adjusts towards grain crops and featured crops, forming specialized villages or agricultural clusters for production; (3) The adjustment of agricultural structure is aligned with natural conditions and resource endowments better than before, and spatial distribution is more optimized.
Rural ecological environment issues in the process of rural-urban transition in China have influenced the production and daily living of residents in rural areas. This article reviews the sources and characteristics of rural environmental pollution, and proposes the restructuring strategies of rural ecological environment from the aspects of resources, production, and living. The research shows that unreasonable resource use, intensive production activities, and changed life style resulted in rural land contamination and water and air pollution. Rural environmental pollution is characterized by diversified sources, sporadic discharges, and inefficient management. These problems call for the highly efficient use of resources, cleaning of production processes, and agglomeration of living space to realize the coordination of rural production development, enhancement of quality of living, and ecological environment improvement.
Based on the academic discussion of multivariate differentiation of rural space, this article analyzes the spatial development process and effects of homestay area in Guanhu Village in Shenzhen using the in-depth interview method and the actor-network theory. The results show that: (1) Homestay place owners and acquaintance networks are the key actors in the development of Guanhu Village, which helped realizing the transformation and restructuring of the rural material space as well as the social space. (2) In the spatial restructuring process of Guanhu Village, the actor-network space of homestay tourism was formed with the continuous construction and translation of acquaintance network, and increasingly the previously dispersed human, economic, and social capitals became concentrated and transformed to social resources. Therefore, the homestay place owners and acquaintance networks forms the nonstructural driving force in the development of Guanhu Village. (3) The new social acquaintance network constructed by external actors and the traditional social acquaintance network of Guanhu Village cannot complete the process of translation and communicate, not only causing the social differentiation between homestay place owners and the local residents and isolation, but also bringing about power struggle within the relationship network, which results in the transformation of dynamic mechanism from nonstructural to binary dynamic mechanism and further restructuring of material space. (4) Based on the social acquaintance network, Guanhu Village has formed a new model of shared economy, which is combined with the Internet platform for sharing goods and services as a cheaper alternative compared with the Internet intermediaries.
On the basis of clarifying the background and connotation of structural reform on the supply side, field observations and in-depth interviews were conducted to examine how land consolidation was used to promote the restructuring of rural areas, and the Huashan Model of Hubei Province was taken as an example. The results show that: (1) It is necessary to carry out the structural reform on the supply side of land consolidation on the basis of background-means-path-objectives; (2) The structural reform on the supply side of land consolidation include structural adjustments, reducing inventories, removing bottlenecks, reducing costs, and facilitating integration. The starting point is to realize the rational allocation of labor, land, capital, institution, industry, and technology factors; (3) The Huashan Model realizes land circulation-shrimp and rice co-production-township enterprise cooperation-market guidance-win win situation for multiple stakeholders, and has become a success case of structural reform on the supply side of land consolidation for rural restructuring. It is suggested that in the process of implementing land consolidation, it is necessary to adopt green development concepts, pay attention to regional planning, rely on scientific and technological supports, develop local industries according to the local conditions, and strengthen institutional supply, so as to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of land consolidation to promote rural restructuring.
