This paper examines the concept of land attachment—a positive emotional relationship between a resettled farmer and his or her rural land—in the context of China’s rapid urbanization and the resultant huge number of resettled and landless farmers. It explores the nature of resettled farmers’ emotional relationships to rural land to reveal the kinds of land that are meaningful to famers’ lives, and the differences among different groups. The study’s conceptual framework was based on place attachment theory. Grounded theory was applied to analyze qualitative data obtained from in-depth interviews. The results show that land attachment can be divided into seven categories: landscape, lifestyle, land income, land rights, land rootedness, land culture, and villagers’ relationships. We also observed three categories of emotional relationships between resettled farmers and rural land: “reluctant to give up rural land and with land attachment”, “willing to give up rural land but with land attachment”, and “willing to give up rural land and without land attachment”. This study’s exploration of the concept of land attachment revealed that rural land is not merely an objective asset but that it also has a multidimensional existence, and may be the focus of subjective loss. The study also observed that it would be helpful to deepen understandings of the subjective loss experienced by resettled farmers as a result of land-requisition policies. Drawing from its findings, the paper concludes with suggestions supportive of the sustainable development of future policies and communities.

Introduction: Industrialization, urbanization, wars, and conflicts have caused farmland abandonment and exacerbated food security issues, posing a major challenge to global food security. Therefore, it is of great significance to monitor the status of crop abandonment in major grain-producing areas. Most of previous studies using remote sensing technology to extract abandoned farmland have small scale and low accuracy, and there was lack of large-scale studies using GF-1 image. Particularly in the Jiangxi Province, as the main grain-producing area of China, the situation of farmland abandonment is still unknown.Methods: In this paper, GF-1 WFV remote sensing images are used as the main data source. A binary decision tree process based on the object-oriented technology classification and vector similarity function change detection methods are adopted to extract abandoned farmland information in Jiangxi Province during 2020–2022 and to describe its spatial pattern.Results: The results show that the overall accuracy of GF-1 remote sensing image extraction based on object-oriented technology is 93%, and the Kappa coefficient is 0.89. The abandoned farmland in Jiangxi Province covers an extensive area of 3.41 × 10⁵ hm², with an abandonment rate of 9.87%. Abandonment is greater in the north and less in the south, with a spatial distribution pattern characterized by sparse coverage in mountainous areas and aggregation in plains areas. Farmland abandonment is most severe in the areas surrounding the northern Poyang Lake Plain, and the degree of farmland abandonment varies significantly among various prefecture cities as well as among different counties. The highest rate of farmland abandonment in prefecture cities was 13.18% and the lowest was 7.13%. The highest rate of farmland abandonment in the county was 24.22%, and the lowest was 1.99%.Discussion: The results are helpful in understanding the status of abandoned farmland in major grain-producing areas. It is believed they are significant for farmland protection and real-time national food security strategy.

The rural homestead is a major part of the rural land system, which is an important carrier of various rural issues such as rural decline, rural hollowing and others. Great changes have occurred in China's rural areas, while the rural homestead has also undergone transformation. Based on summarizing the multi-functional classification of homesteads from previous research, this study divided and defined the population bearing function, assets, and residential function of homesteads from the perspective of functional improvement according to the results of a survey questionnaire. Using Poyang County as the case study, this paper analyzed the functional transformation of rural homesteads through the model of coordinated transformation degree. The results demonstrated the following trends. (1) From 2000 to 2017, the transformation degrees of rural homestead functions in Poyang County have obviously improved overall. (2) The high value areas of the transformation degrees were mainly distributed in the northern hilly region and around Poyang Lake, while most of the low value areas were distributed in the plain areas near the county town. (3) In the regions with better location conditions and resource endowments, the basic conditions and trend of non-agriculturalization of the population, capital and other factors are more significant. According to the differentiation of rural homestead transformations which occurred in different regions, the government could put forward targeted development suggestions for the future.