Land, nature, and the social environment in contiguous poor regions are harsh and difficult to change. The poor adaptive capacities of the socio-ecological systems of these regions are the main causes of deep, persistent poverty. In February 2016, the Chinese government issued a policy proposing to promote poverty alleviation by relocation (PAR) by means of the "Linking increases in urban construction land with decreases in rural construction land" policy (or simply, the "Link Policy" or LP), which intends to realize the sustainable social and economic development of local villages. Since then, many pilot projects have been carried out across the country based on local resources, environment, and economic development; however, few related studies on these cases have been conducted. After a review of poverty alleviation policies, this paper first introduces the unsustainable conditions of poor rural areas and the implications and advantages of PAR under the Link Policy; we then analyzed the complete PAR process, including formulation, implementation, and completion, by taking Tongyu County in Jilin Province as an example. The study found that the "whole village relocation" model practiced in Tongyu County was relatively successful in terms of improving the living environment, income, and public services of local villagers. On the other hand, there were three main problems: first, many follow-up industries were dominated by the village collectives and heavily dependent on government support or subsidies; second, the newly built village faced the dilemma of "re-hollowing" due to the out-migration of young people and the aging population; third, it was difficult to achieve a true requisition-compensation balance of farmland.
Agricultural village is an important rural type in China. The evolution process and mechanism of its cultural landscape are different from those of the industrialized village. The paper focuses this theme by a case study of Qianzhai Village of Qufu City, Shangdong Province. In the case of Qianzhai Village, the evolution of its settlement has experienced three stages: mechanical expansion, sprawling expansion and hollowing, and recentralization. The landscape evolution of residents' houses has undergone three phases: traditional quadrangle house, one-storied house and multistoried house. The evolution of its land use has experienced three stages: circled stratification, fragment and intensive use, and concentration and extensive use. We can see that the main driving factors of cultural landscape evolution of agricultural village are the changes of rural population, society, economy and culture, which are influenced by the change of urban-rural relation, the national modernization process and economic development, the reform of family planning and land system, and the changes in governmental policies. In the future, the modernization, ecological trend, and individualization for residents' houses of agricultural villages in China will develop step by step. The recentralization of settlement and the scaled, sustainable, intensive land use are likely to be the trends of agricultural villages in China.
Traditional opinion considers that natural resources play an important positive role in economic development, while resource curse theory holds that natural resources usually obstruct economic increase. This debate needs further exploration. In most of empirical studies on resource curse theory, the economic development of an area is mainly evaluated by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), however, the social and cultural contents of economic development are seldom considered. Thus, the Human Developing Index (HDI) was chosen to describe the comprehensive developing situation of an area in our study. Based on the panel data from the year of 2000 to 2011, the relationship between Human Developing Index and resource exploitation degree (RED) of 30 provinces in China (Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao were not included because of the restriction of data acquisition) was investigated by correlation coefficient analysis and regression analysis. We found that resource curse did exist over the entire country and its effect on 30 provinces were not exactly the same. According to the effects of resource curse, these provinces could be classified into four types: no resource curse provinces, slight resource curse provinces, severe resource curse provinces, and extreme resource curse provinces. Testing from two short time periods 2000-2005, and 2006-2011, the resource curse effect was not prominent. However, testing from the entire period of 2000-2011, the effect was obvious among each province.
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