Land Use Policy 27 (2010) 457–470 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Building new countryside in China: A geographical perspective Hualou Long, Yansui Liu * , Xiubin Li, Yufu Chen Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences, 11A Datun Road, Anwai, Beijing 100101, China article info Article history: Received 17 March 2009 Received in revised form 20 June 2009 Accepted 22 June 2009 Keywords: Countryside Rural restructuring Geographical perspective Development strategy Rural–urban relationships China abstract The central government of China recently mapped out an important strategy on “building a new coun- tryside” to overall coordinate urban and rural development and gear up national economic growth. This paper analyzes the potential factors influencing the building of a new countryside in China, and pro- vides a critical discussion of the problems and implications concerning carrying out this campaign, from a geographical perspective. To some extent, regional discrepancies, rural poverty, rural land-use issues and the present international environment are four major potential factors. Our analyses indicated that land consolidation, praised highly by the governments, is not a panacea for China’s rural land-use issues concerning building a new countryside, and the key problem is how to reemploy the surplus rural labors and resettle the land-loss farmers. More attentions should be paid to caring for farmers’ future livelihoods in the process of implementing the strategy. The regional measures and policies concerning building a new countryside need to take the obvious regional discrepancies both in physical and socio-economic conditions into account. In a World Trade Organization (WTO) membership environment, efficient land use for non-agricultural economic development, to some extent, needs to be a priority in the eastern region instead of blindly conserving land to maintain food security, part task of which can be shifted to the central region and the northeastern region. More preferential policies should be formulated to reverse the rural brain–drain phenomenon. Based on the analyses and the complexity of China’s rural problems, the authors argue that building new countryside in China will be an arduous task and a long road, the target of which is hard to achieve successfully in this century. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction At present, rural development and urban development in China are experiencing a transition period of both society and economy (Long et al., 2007a; Unger, 2002). In the process of industrialization and urbanization since the economic reforms of 1978, agriculture and the countryside have made a big contribution to, to some extent, the huge sacrifices for the development of industries and the cities in China, which has resulted in a series of problems that hamper the social and economic development of China (Long et al., 2009). Under these circumstances, the central government of China recently mapped out an important long-term development strategy on “building a new countryside,” which is expected to solve above problems through coordinating urban and rural development. To some extent, China’s building a new countryside is a kind of policy concerning countryside planning. Countryside planning first started to appear in the literature around the end of the 1960s, with a strong emphasis on village form and expansion, but with a growing recognition of the role of rural area or community in * Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 10 64889037; fax: +86 10 64857065. E-mail addresses: longhl@igsnrr.ac.cn (H. Long), liuys@igsnrr.ac.cn (Y. Liu). regional development (Robinson, 1997; Selman, 2006). Rural devel- opment and urbanization are closely inter-related in the aspects of migration, employment, land use and natural environments. With the process of urbanization, the rural population is increasingly marginalized and natural environments are increasingly destroyed. A new rural–urban compact needs to arise where cities acknowl- edge and pay for environmental sustainability (Gutman, 2007). How to perceive the rural world in its divergence and conver- gence with the urban world is a new paradigm of the concept of sustainable development (Hudeckova, 1995). A new paradigm of multi-dimensional rural development has emerged which advo- cates a broader conception of the rurality where the rural is no longer the monopoly of the farmer (Cloke, 2006; Korf and Oughton, 2006; Woods, 1998, 2005). We can easily find some meta-themes concerning new coun- tryside in western literatures, e.g. globalization/modernization, restructuring/reshaping, post-productivism/environmentalism, and political economy (Beesley et al., 2003; Cloke et al., 1995; Edwards et al., 2003; Hoggart and Paniagua, 2001; Johnsen, 2004; McCarthy, 2008; Pierce et al., 2000; Woods, 2008). Actually, the rural areas are being produced through increasingly globalized forms and relationships (McCarthy, 2008). Agriculture is at the heart of rural development (UMOD, 1969). However, agricultural 0264-8377/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2009.06.006