Abstract
The Chinese government has pursued rural land consolidation under the Building New Rural Communities (BNRC) initiative. The consolidation projects aim to address the hollowing village problem, improve the living standards of rural dwellers, and promote urban-rural integration. Rural villages with small populations and poor infrastructure are merged into a centralized rural community, and their inhabitants are resettled. The newly vacated buildings are then converted to agriculture land, which allows cities to expand under the “no net loss” land-use policy. Despite the significance of the initiative, both in terms of the scale of operation and the impacts on the affected households, there are few empirical studies that scrutinize this form of rural restructuring. Drawing on data collected via surveys and interviews, this paper examines the processes of land consolidation and its impacts on villagers. From a development-as-modernization perspective, we outline three main processes of land consolidation: village mergers and resettlement, land circulation to rural cooperatives, and rural industrial development. Overall, the effects of land consolidation on the livelihood of resettled villagers are positive. This system generally improves housing and living conditions through increased levels of off-farm employment and income, but there are a number of barriers that may hinder a villager’s ability to find different employment. Housing and neighborhood characteristics have significant effects on the life satisfaction of villagers.
Highlights
Rural livelihood and land-use are undergoing an unprecedented transformation in China due to many interrelated processes
Our field observations and interviews show that land consolidation consists of three distinct but closely related processes: (1) village mergers and resettlement, (2) land circulation to rural cooperatives, and (3) the fostering of new rural industries
The village committee acted as the planner, organizer, and promoter in terms of formulating land consolidation plans, inducing investment to the village, and encouraging the villagers to participate in the village merger and land circulation
Summary
Rural livelihood and land-use are undergoing an unprecedented transformation in China due to many interrelated processes. Land 2020, 9, 118 into forest or grassland for ecological benefits [17,18]. These processes of rural restructuring have highly uneven consequences. While rural areas near urban centers have experienced the benefits of development, remote inland areas have fewer opportunities to develop [19]. Land consolidation is an important but controversial driver of rural restructuring in China It is estimated that the average income in cities is threefold of that in rural areas, and the gap between cities and rural areas is still widening in terms of income, education, environmental quality, health-care access, etc. [20,21,22,23].
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