Rural development in metropolitan areas and implications for rural vitalization strategy

Abstract

Rural vitalization is closely related to the driving force of urban development and metropolitan areas are best positioned to promote rural vitalization because they are generally in a relatively advanced stage of rural development. Comparing the status of rural development and its influencing factors in major cities can provide a reference for optimizing the strategy of rural revitalization in metropolitan areas and provide some experiences for rural development in less developed areas. This study selected 14 national central cities and potential central cities, constructed an indicator system from three aspects—strong agriculture, beautiful rural environment, and wealthy rural residents, and adopted an improved entropy weight method and Pearson correlation analysis to compare and analyze the rural development level and its influencing factors in China’s metropolises since 2000, and then explored its policy implications for implementing the rural vitalization strategy. The study result shows that the rural development level of the 14 metropolises is very different. Southern cities generally have higher rural development level than that of northern cities and rural development level of national central cities is not necessarily higher than that of potential central cities. Different rural development levels mean that a higher urban development stage does not necessarily lead to a real urban- rural integration, highlighting the inherent necessity of timely and effective government intervention in urban and rural development and the implementation of rural revitalization strategy. Rural development level is closely related to the stage of economic development, local fiscal capacity, diversification of households’ livelihoods, agricultural structure, and other factors. Therefore, rural vitalization is a gradual process of advancement. It is necessary to establish scientific goals and measures of rural revitalization on the basis of local development foundations. Additionally, rural revitalization should be based on and move beyond agriculture. On the one hand, it should guarantee the development rights of major grain producing areas and traditional agricultural areas through transfer payments. On the other hand, it should continuously expand the value-added space of rural industries. In particular, rural revitalization needs to break the current segmentation of urban and rural governance and to truly give priority to agricultural and rural developments in concepts, plans, policies, and regulations.