18 pages, Based on panel data from the Rural Fixed Point Survey of the Ministry of
Agriculture over the period 2004-2016 and supplementary survey data on information
and communications technology (ICT) applications in the countryside, this paper employs
the difference in differences (DID) method to analyze the effects of ICT applications on
rural households’ agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) with mobile phone signal,
internet and 3G mobile network connections as indicators, and decomposes and evaluates
the constituent factors. Our findings reveal a positive effect of ICTs on rural households’
TFP, which primarily stemmed from rising agricultural technical efficiency. However, ICTs
exerted no significant effect on agricultural technical progress during this paper’s data
period due to limited rural human capital. These findings are consistent with robustness test
results based on counterfactual and matching methods.
14 pages, via online journal, China's rapid urbanization process has pushed rural villages into an urban-rural integration movement. Several modes and approaches have been applied to remake space in rural China, which differ greatly in restructuring outcomes. In response, this article builds on the insights of regime theory to develop a conceptual framework to reveal the mechanism behind China's rural spatial restructuring and seeks to explore the underlying reasons that affect the outcomes. It is found that resource adequacy, the quality of resource coalition, and the effectiveness of implementation determine the rural regime's capacity to manage spatial restructuring. Case studies from Hua County, Chaohu City, and Shenzhen are used to illustrate the conceptual framework's application and facilitate a comparative analysis from the perspective of rural regime capacity. The findings provide a critical rethinking of the “sustainable remaking of rural space”, which could therefore shed light on the rural governance of countries in the global south generally.
12 pages, via online journal, Rural settlements in China have been experiencing unprecedented transformation since the economic reforms of the late 1970s. This paper examines population movement over the post-reform era and how this affects settlement patterns in an inland nonmetropolitan county-level city region with a well performing economy. It is found that the settlement size distribution in Gongyi is generally transforming from a traditional rural pattern to one that features an urban system, taking place in the form of “in situ urbanisation” and “rural urbanisation”. Without experiencing mass out-migration and in line with the transition of China's political economy, Gongyi has developed its local urban system in parallel with the life and spatial cycles of city-based urbanisation in China. From the perspective of urbanisation cycles, “in situ urbanisation” underpinned by relevant socioeconomic and political conditions is argued to be both theoretically meaningful and practically useful in the context of the evolving settlement systems in China and less urbanised countries.
21 pages, Multiple dynamics jointly determine who we befriend, however, researchers have failed to systematically assess which processes matter most under different circumstances. Here I draw on observations around how the demands of paddy rice cultivation shape social interaction to demonstrate that the relative importance of reciprocity, transitivity and generalised exchange to who rice producers choose as friends varies with the amount of agricultural land under their control. In doing so, I use unique data on farm size and friendship amongst 4713 rice-growing smallholders in 162 rural villages in Jiangxi, China along with a new technique for measuring the relative importance of effects in Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models. In line with the micro-level component of the recently advanced “theory of network ecology”, results suggest that features of an individual’s proximal environment can powerfully moderate the relative expression of network-formation mechanisms such that for some individuals, a dynamic may be expected to hold substantial sway over the process of choosing social contacts and, for others, no sway at all.
11 pages, via online journal, Land fragmentation is an interesting physical character in some developing countries, especially China. This study aims to discover the direct and mediated effects of land fragmentation on collective action in China based on an empirical test and the social-ecological system framework. We introduce three innovations to the literature on collective action in the commons. First, we focus on the mechanism of land fragmentation on collective action in the commons, which has been largely ignored in the literature. Second, building on the social-ecological system framework, we use structural equation modeling, which is robust to endogeneity and latent variable problems. Third, we use original survey data from 3895 households and 284 villages from 17 provinces/regions in China, a critical case because China has some of the most fragmented farmland use in the world. We find that land fragmentation has a direct negative effect on irrigation collective action. And besides the direct negative effect, there are four indirect factors: dependency on farming, irrigation rule-making, economic pressure and land circulation. Of these, the first three have a negative effect, and the last one, a positive effect. Our findings add to the theoretical literature on collective action in the commons and suggest new policy handles for more efficient land and labor markets in China.
