The status of perceived community resilience in transitional rural society: An empirical study from central China

Abstract

Abstract During China's recent social transition, rural communities have experienced rapid changes in resources, organizational structure, and governance due to urbanization, rural industrialization, and rural-urban migration. How these communities react to social adversity and uncertainty can be assessed with an index of perceived community resilience. Using a Chinese version of the perceived community resilience scale, we analyze data from a multilevel survey of two rural counties in central China. Latent profile analysis and a multilevel regression mixture model are employed to classify community resilience and to explore how the social-ecological system influences this classification. Community resilience is classified into “autonomous community”, “cooperative community”, and “authoritative community”, and we find the proportion of cooperative communities to be the highest and the proportion of autonomous communities is lowest. These results suggest that cooperation among rural residents in rural communities is increasing. How rural residents perceive community resilience is based on their individual features, which reflect the impacts of recent social changes on livelihoods. Socio-ecological variables, including geographical features, financial status, social networks, and traditional culture, have significant effects on the categories of community resilience. In today's China, rural residents have decreased their dependence on rural leaders and increased cooperation at the community level. Some autonomous communities may be unsustainable as they are populated mainly by the elderly and have insufficient resources to be adaptable.