Assessment of decoupling between rural settlement area and rural population in China

In China, changes in rural settlement patterns are crucial because they may affect agricultural sustainability through encroachment on productive cropland and water resources and also reduce biodiversity. Rapid urbanization with accompanying socioeconomic transformation has resulted in decrease of the rural register population (RRP) in China since 2000. The effects of this change in RRP on rural settlement area (RSA) and the factors shaping the relationship between these measures of population and land use have attracted extensive research interest. We investigated the changes in RRP and RSA and used a decoupling model to analyze the relationship between them. We found that whereas RRP in China increased by 1.12% during 1996-2000, it decreased by 4.91% during 2000-2005. RSA increased by 0.62% and 0.09% during the periods 1996-2000 and 2000-2005, respectively. The RSA was slightly decoupled from RRP during 1996-2000 due to the shift in rural housing from one-floor houses to multi-floor houses. In the period 2000-2005, RSA was actually strongly negatively decoupled from RRP due to village-hollowing, which was driven mainly by a dual-track real property system (ownership by collectives, but use rights for individuals) as well as institutional-managerial and socioeconomic factors. In central and western China, the RSA was better able to be decoupled from RRP than in eastern China due to interprovincial rural migration.