Land Consolidation in Rural China: Life Satisfaction among Resettlers and Its Determinants

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.

An Application of the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) to Value the Land Consumption and Ecosystem Services

“…In detail, the estimated coefficients allowed to calculate the implicit WTA for compensating a given increment in LC. Our findings support previous studies showing that SWB is strongly linked to the satisfaction of basic human needs and to the social costs due to the loss of free resources (Aguado et al, 2018;Costanza et al, 2007;Hsu, 2019;Tay et al, 2015;Tong et al, 2020). This work has shown that the loss of undeveloped land, natural or semi-natural, has a value for the society.…”

An Evaluation of Coupling Coordination between Rural Development and Water Environment in Northwestern China

“…First, at the subsystem level, the findings show that economic development has been the key driver of rural development, whereas social development has relatively little impact. This result suggests that policymakers have neglected social development in rural areas, such as poverty reduction, social inclusion, and the provision of better welfare, which have become a hindrance to rural development [57,58]. In rural China, the problem of rural population aging and hollowing out is serious [59,60].…”

Correlation between Elderly Migrants’ Needs and Environmental Adaptability: A Discussion Based on Human Urbanization Features

“…For living needs, the Chinese government has established a rights-protection system for the elderly through the Law on Protection of the Elderly’s Rights and Interests, which emphasizes living care, health care, lifelong education, social participation, and spiritual support [ 22 ]. From the perspective of equity, urbanization resettlement guarantees elderly migrants’ rights to access public services, for example, basic medical care and livelihood security [ 23 , 24 ]. With improved living standards, some elderly migrants have changed their lifestyle to “urban elderly” and begun to pursue all aspects of high-quality public services [ 25 , 26 ].…”