Evaluation And Space-time Pattern On Rurality And Analysis Of Its Driving Factors In Northeast China

“Agriculture, rural and farmer” work faces numerous comprehensive demands and challenges in the new period according to the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC, the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth meeting and the Central Rural Work Conference. And that’s particularly critical and important to the whole social economy, whether agricultural foundation is stable, rurality is harmonious, and farmers can live and work in peace.As the granary reserve and production base in China, the Northeast China featured by typical regional characteristics is vital important to China’s Grains Security. Industry and agriculture in the Northeast China have developed to a considerable extent under the policy of “Vitalizing the Traditional Industrial Base of the Northeast China” and “Ensuring the status of grain production” which are put forward in the 16 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Regions, featured by poorly development, are facing two challenges of transition and development. Temporal and spatial characteristics and primary factors of rurality in Northeast China are of great and practical reference value to the promotion of regional rural transformation and development and to the design of rural development policy according to local conditions. From the perspective of geography, this paper analyzed the rurality in Northeast China from the following six aspects:1. Analyze the property of rurality in Northeast China. All aspects of property in population, industry, living, material and spiritual self are constantly improved, but compared with people’s needs, there is still a gap.2. Rural development types. Accordingly to the work of Long Hualou and Liu Yansui, this paper defines four rural development types, i.e. agriculture-dominated rural development type, industry-dominated rural development type, balanced rural development type, and rural development type focusing on business, tourism and providing services, and classifies the rural development types in Northeast China.3. Measurement of rurality in Northeast China. Taking the counties in the Northeast China as the basic spatial unit, this paper examines the space–time pattern of the rurality in major grain producing areas of Northeast China by evaluating the rurality indexes quantitatively of the counties in the year of 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012, and then divides the counties into such five typical areas as the weakest rurality, weaker rurality, moderate rurality, stronger rurality and the strongest rurality. We have found that the rurality indexes of the counties in Northeast China are generally high and tend to decline from 2000 to 2012, and the rurality indexes of the counties in the northern areas are higher than that of the southern areas, which are directly proportional to the distance of its regional central city and takes on the pattern of circularity, that is, the closer to its central city, the smaller the rurality index is.4. Analysis of spatio-temporal pattern evolution of rurality in Northeast China. With the help of ArcGIS and Exploratory Spatial data Analysis method(ESDA), this paper identifies and analyzes the “hot spots” and “cold spots” areas of the rurality in different times, as well as the pattern of space-time evolution. We find that the counties whose rurality indexes are similar tend to agglomerate, and the counties with low–low values or high–high values tend to be strengthened in spatial agglomeration from 2000 to 2012, accompanying the transformation of the “hot spots” to the northern areas and the “cold spots” to the southern areas.5. Analysis of critical influencing factors of rurality in Northeast China. In this paper we found that policy from government, development of industrial structure, agricultural mechanization, rise of chemical fertilizer, and foreign direct investment were the primary factors of rurality and its space structure variation.