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Land-use change and socio-economic driving forces of rural settlement in China from 1996 to 2005

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Abstract

While urbanization has accelerated, the rural population in China has started decreasing in recent years. However, the expansion of rural settlement has not been sufficiently curbed. The questions of why this has happened and who has driven the land-use change (LUC) of rural settlement in China have aroused great interests among researchers. In this paper, it is suggested that population is not always a positive driving force for the LUC of rural settlement in China. Furthermore, socio-economic driving forces other than urbanization, population and industrialization are analyzed. On a national scale, the major driving forces are the per-capita rural housing area and the cultivated land area. On a regional scale, the main driving forces in the eastern China are the house-building capacity of rural households and the per-capita rural housing area; while in the central China, the main driving forces are rural housing investment, the proportion of primary industry employees in the rural working population, and the cultivated land area. For the western China, the main driving forces are rural register population and cultivated land area.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Wei Song, Baiming Chen & Ying Zhang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Ying Zhang

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  1. Wei Song
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  2. Baiming Chen
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  3. Ying Zhang
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Correspondence to Wei Song.

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Foundation item: Under the auspices of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41001108), China Clean Development Mechanism Fund (No. 2031202400003)

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Song, W., Chen, B. & Zhang, Y. Land-use change and socio-economic driving forces of rural settlement in China from 1996 to 2005. Chin. Geogr. Sci. 24, 511–524 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-013-0633-6

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