Abstract
China’s long-standing urban-rural dichotomy has led to a widening gap between urban and rural areas, posing a huge challenge to the sustainable development of Chinese society. This paper adopted the subjective-objective weighting method, coupled coordination degree model, and geographically weighted regression model to conduct urban-rural sustainable development research on 31 provincial administrative regions in China and discussed their spatial-temporal divergence and driving mechanisms during 2007–2018. The results showed that (1) the quality of both rural revitalization and new urbanization improved during the study period, and the gap between them showed a trend of increasing after fluctuations. Both of them had significant spatial and temporal divergence characteristics. (2) The urban-rural coupling coordination degree in China continued to increase during the study period and showed an overall pattern of “high in the east-west and low in the north and southwest”. The changes of relative development type indicated that new urbanization had far surpassed rural revitalization during the study period. (3) The coefficients of driving factors varied significantly in space, showing a hierarchical band distribution. Seven of the eight driving factors showed a strong positive correlation in the vast majority of regions. The results and suggestions of this research can further promote the organic combination of rural revitalization and new urbanization strategy, which is of great practical significance for narrowing the urban-rural gap and realizing sustainable urban-rural development. Likewise, it can be a reference for other developing countries around the world.
Highlights
Urban-rural relations are the most basic economic and social relations, gradually formed in the division of social production and labor [1]
It can be seen that the enhancement of U(b) was significantly greater than that of R(a) during the study period
The number of regions located in the middle level increased, and the spatial distribution gradually tended to develop towards a balanced state
Summary
Urban-rural relations are the most basic economic and social relations, gradually formed in the division of social production and labor [1]. The urban-rural relations are very rich in connotation, including urban-rural economic relations, social relations, class relations, ecological and environmental relations, cultural and location relations [2]. The study of urban-rural relations can involve many disciplines. According to the general characteristics and implications of the evolution of urban-rural relations, they can be divided into three stages: merger, divergence, and integration [3]. At the beginning of the period, the early classical theories emphasized the close connection between urban and rural areas. The proposed dual structure theory led to the tendency of urban-rural division and urban-rural bias. After the 1980s, the study of urban-rural
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