How Different Land Systems Lead to Discrepancy of Rural Population–Land Relationships: Case Study of Heilongjiang Province, China

Abstract

There are two types of land systems in China: collective-owned and state-owned. Under both systems, differences in land ownership have led to different land-use and management systems, resulting in urban–rural dual structures under the jurisdiction of local governments and urban–rural unitary structures in reclamation areas of the state-owned land system. This has significantly changed the relationship between the rural population and land, which has been intensified by rapid urbanization and industrialization. Therefore, based on the rural population and remote sensing data, this study uses the Tapio decoupling model to determine the relationships between the rural population and residential land under different land systems. The main results indicate that the evolution of the rural population and residential land area under different land systems presents an obvious inverse relationship. From 1995 to 2020, under the jurisdiction of the local government, the land area and population of rural dwellers declined, with the decline in population being faster than that in residential areas. At the same time, the spatial agglomeration of residential areas from the middle to the south of the province expanded. In contrast, the population and residential land area showed significant reverse changes in state-owned domains. Rural residential land area declined, and the rural population increased, most notably in the eastern region. Furthermore, strong negative decoupling between the rural population and rural residential land was observed in areas under local government jurisdiction (accounting for 89.61%), meaning that the population declined while the living area increased, which is not conducive to increasing intensive land-use and productivity. Simultaneously, in state-owned domains, only 33.33% of the rural population and residential land areas presented the above-mentioned negative decoupling, with the remaining 66.67% being coordinated. After 2010, due to the socio-economic gap, the proportion of coordination in local government jurisdiction areas continued to decrease, whereas coordination in reclamation areas remained stable. Therefore, the data suggest that a single land allocation and governance regime across urban and rural domains under the state-owned land system is more helpful in enabling populations and efficient land-use. This suggests that, in the future, it will be helpful to consider promoting the effective integration of urban and rural land markets, optimizing the allocation of urban and rural land resources, and enhancing the reform of the rural land system in order to realize synergistic interactions between the urban and rural populations and construction land in Heilongjiang Province.