Gansu Coordinated Urban And Rural Development Problems

The three decades of reform and opening to the outside world in China have also been three decades of upheavals in Chinese socio-economic structure. Of all the structural changes, the urban and rural relationship and its structural changes have been the focus of all. How to correctly deal with the urban and rural relationship and the coordinated development of the two areas and how to make wholesome the interactive mechanism between them are of strategic significance to the development of the whole country. With the advent of the 21st century, the urban and rural relationship in China, especially the task of how to coordinate development between the two in the process of urbanization, has become a key issue of wide attention.The great difference due to urban and rural imbalanced development has divided current Chinese urban and rural relationships into three categories:the first is that of strong urban and strong rural areas, where regional urban and rural economic development has been relatively advanced, such as Shanghai and Jiangsu Province in the east; the second is that of strong cities and weak countryside, where the level of urban development is relatively high while rural development is lagging behind and there is quite a gap between the two; the third is that of both weak urban and rural areas, where the whole level of regional economic development is relatively low and the gap between the city and the countryside is great and continues to be enlarged. Such places are mainly distributed in western China and other underdeveloped areas. To the last category belongs the urban and rural relationship of Gansu Province, where the gap between urban and rural areas is far wider than the developed regions and the overall development of the province is also lagging behind other regions. This type of double lagging behind in the urban and rural relationship of Gansu has made this study both strongly target-oriented and realistically useful.The thesis, from the perspectives of interdisciplinary subjects such as regional economics, development economics, sociology and institutional economics and based upon current Chinese and foreign theories on urban and rural relationships and coordinated urban and rural development, makes a complete survey of the evolution and developing trends of urban and rural relationships in China and provides the author's analysis and judgment of the dualistically structured regional gap and the level of urban and rural coordinated development. With its premise on the particularity of Gansu the thesis has made a quantitative analysis of urban and rural relationship of the province in terms of temporal and spatial dimensions. The calculated results show that the urban and rural relationship in Gansu is highly unbalanced, the urban and rural coordination and the spatial organization thereof demonstrate a great regional gap and an unbalanced developing trend. Compared with the whole country, western China and even the northwest of China, Gansu has been long affected by its three big disadvantages (overdependence upon residual institutions, lagging behind in market institution innovation and marginalization in introducing regional institutions) and five big regional disadvantages (in economic dynamics, ecological pressure, public services, spatial conditions and social restraints). Therefore, the coordinated urban and rural development requires breakthroughs and innovation in mechanism construction, mode selection and path determination. Based up the mechanisms of urban and rural capital flow, agricultural technological advances, transfer of surplus agricultural labor, urban and rural ecological coordination and convergence of urban and rural cultures, etc, this thesis has provided targeted suggestions concerning institutional innovation, public services improvement, industrial coordination and spatial classification for a coordinated urban and rural development in Gansu.