Patterns And Mechanism Of The Disappearing Villages In The Rural Area Of Central China

The study on the disappearing villages is a hot topic of academic debate in the fields of sociology,economics, geography, history, political science and so on in recent years. The research contents involvethe village social structure, village organization, village landscape, village morphology, village economicactivity, village religion and the relationship between village and environment and so on,most of which aremacro perspective studies. The basic theory of the paper is the household behavior theory. A village is asettlement which peasants inhabited intensively. The process of the disappearing villages is essentially theevolution of the urban and rural settlements, which is the changing process of household living space. Sothe research on the disappearing villages from the viewpoint that household changed living space is a microperspective to study. Based on Gongyi city of Zhengzhou City, this paper studied the core problem thathousehold selected and changed his living space, analyzed the mechanism and path of the disappearingvillages which household changed living space and induced and summarized the theoretical model of thedisappearing villages.This paper considers that, the disappearing villages and urbanization are the twoindivisible aspects, and the process of the disappearing villages is irreversible on the whole. From the microperspective, that household changed living space was the decisive power of the disappearing villages.Many factors effected household changing living space which showed different area characters. Thus, thedisappearing villages can be divided into different types, each of which had different mechanism and pathof villages termination.This paper studied the disappearing villages by using GIS, literature analysis, inductive reasoning,theoretical modeling, social investigation and the case analysis and other methods, of which wascomparatively analyzed the changes household living space and residential land, and observed and verifiedthe process of the disappearing villages using GIS and social investigation methods. On the basis ofliterature review, this paper constructed the theoretical analysis framework on the disappearing villages,which is based on the micro perspective of households and the medium scale of county as the research unit,and in a push-pull model, household comprehensively measured and evaluated the native and newinhabited villages,then made the decision to change living space, which directly determined originally inhabited village disappeared.With demonstration effect of the first households that changed living space,other households may follow the migration, and the formation of all households migration process was theprocess of the disappearing village.The empirical part of this paper summarized the time, spatial, social and economic characteristicsof the disappearing villages of Gongyi city area, and analyzed the relationship between village terminationand geographical environment factors, on this basis, we divided the disappearing villages into differenttypes of Gongyi city area, and studied each type dynamic mechanism and path. The conclusions arefollowing:(1)The three types involved the mountainous migration, project impact migration and cityexpansion migration type. Though different types of the disappearing villages were results that householdchanged living space under under the push-pull model, the specific motivation and dominant factors hadmuch difference, and the main difference is that the government administrative power in the process of thedisappearing villages. The first type of village termination basically was the result of village householdsspontaneous migrate, then the government had gradually become an important support strength after aperiod of time; the second type of village termination had experienced from the government forcedhouseholds to migrate to the government guidance and many subjects involved in migration process; thethird type of village termination was the land urbanization and rural settlement wild change process by thegovernment dominated.(2)The time and spatial characteristics of high and low altitude villages weredifferent, but the disappearing villages were closely associated with geographical environment and regionalconditions, and they had different mechanisms. The disappeared villages around towns were muchsweeping and relatively high economic level, correspondingly, the disappeared villages in mountainousarea were relatively small size, households production and living conditions were very poor, and lack ofinfrastructure and other services.(3)Originally, the disappearing villages was closely related to thegeographical environment and regional conditions, but in consideration of villages own conditiondifferences, it were not identical that the way and the degree of geographical factors influencing villagetermination. The mountainous migration type was that households migration caused village to decline or tooverall disappear, and household migrated to overcome the negative impacts of geographical factors; thecity expansion migration type essentially was that villages disappeared by the government landexpropriation, because those villages had good geographical factors. The project impact migration type was that villages unconsciously become regional protection, land-use and competition object.The innovation point of this paper is study on the disappearing villages of Henan Province usingby combination geography and economics, GIS technology and the micro household perspective. Thedeficiency is fewer sample size which was effected with research condition, and the research depth wasinsufficient. We need to supplement and deepen in the later research.