The booming rural tourism (RT) has broadened ways for rural revitalization and poverty alleviation strategy in China. Rural tourism enterprises (RTEs), as the core operator and a hinge delivering its benefits to rural communities, play a critical role in the achievement of RT expectation on rural revitalization. To address the research gap in business characteristics and efficiency of RTEs, and make the theoretical contribution to rural business and tourism management, this study collected and analyzed the business data with investors or managers of 60 national-class RTEs in Jiangsu Province, north Yangtze River Delta of China. The results showed that business characteristics of RTEs varied with their property, business strategy, and rural industrial base. Flexible and sustainable business operation and comprehensive regional development have a profound influence on business efficiency that presented multi spatial disparity from inter-regional and intra-regional views, respectively. In addition, the political and practical implications on rural business and RTEs for research and practice were also discussed.

The transition of rural industrial land has a critical role to play in rural revitalization. The study of rural spatial governance is an important starting point for analyzing the processes and exploring the paths through which the transition of rural industrial land takes place. This study takes the case of Shunde District, China, a typical semi-urbanized area, as its research object and constructs an analytical framework for rural industrial land transition based on spatial governance; it uses this case to conduct an analysis of the spatiotemporal processes and dilemmas involved in rural industrial land transition. Hengding Industrial Park is taken as a specific example to study how the processes and mechanisms involved in the transition of rural industrial land work in practice from a spatial governance perspective, and the path of rural revitalization based on rural spatial governance is discussed. The conclusions are as follows: (1) the fragmentation of rural space, the difficulty of renewing rural industrial land, the chaos of ownership, and the incomplete mechanism of the differentiation and game of multiple subjects, are the main obstacles in the process of rural industrial land transition in Shunde District; (2) since the 1990s, the rural industrial land dominant morphology—including quantity, structure, and so on—and the recessive morphology, including property rights, organizational systems, and input–output efficiency, have all undergone significant changes; (3) the comprehensive governance of rural space under the analytical framework of “matter-ownership-organization,” is an important starting point for analyzing the process of transition of rural industrial land. The “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches, combining rural spatial governance strategy and the effective participation of multiple subjects, are important means of promoting the transition of rural industrial land; (4) rural spatial governance is conducive to promoting the transition of rural land use and the healthy development of rural space. The experience of semi-urbanized regions with rural revitalization is of vital significance for other regions.

Due to the rapid urbanization and industrialization, urban agglomeration has become the area with the most drastic and concentrated land use change. The research on the evolution law and structural characteristics of urban agglomeration land use system is of great significance for the sustainable development. Taking the middle reaches of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration (MRYRUA) of China as the study area, we analyzed the phasic changes from 1980 to 2018 in land use/cover in the MRYRUA as well as the spatial differences between the three core regions. Furthermore, the transfer matrix of land use/cover change (LUCC) was converted to network, with land use types as nodes and conversion relationships between different land types as network connecting lines. Complex network indexes such as centrality, diffusion, and dominant flow were applied to identify the major changes in land use types, key change paths, and transformation patterns. The results show that: (1) in the past 40 years, the building land area in the MRYRUA has increased significantly, while the area of crop land and forest has, and still is, decreasing at an accelerated rate; (2) in terms of the scale, structure, and spatial distribution of land use transfer, there are distinct differences among the three core regions. The Wuhan metropolitan area has the largest intensity of land use transfer and the most drastic structural adjustment; (3) in all four periods, the land use transition network, crop land, and water bodies are the key land use types. Over time, the influence of building land and forest in the land use transition network has increased; and (4) the first transfer direction of each land use type was stable during different periods, such as the transfer of crop land to water bodies and building land, the transfer of water bodies to crop land, and the mutual transformations among crop land and forest, indicating a stable transfer pattern in the MRYRUA.

The concept of strong sustainability suggests that natural capital is irreplaceable and emphasizes that human natural consumption cannot exceed the carrying capacity of the ecological environment. In the realistic context of tightening resource constraints and ecological degradation, how to explore the optimal economic and well-being output under certain ecological constraints has become an important topic in sustainability research. Ecological well-being performance (EWP) can comprehensively reflect the efficiency of natural resources and ecological inputs into the well-being level and has become an important tool for sustainable development research. Based on strong sustainability, this paper constructs an EWP evaluation index system. It decomposes EWP into two stages: ecological economy and economic well-being, which opens the “black box” of the ecological well-being conversion process. PCA-DEA, the network super-efficiency Epsilon-based measure (Network SEBM) model, and Geodetector are used to dynamically measure the EWP in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA) from 2010 to 2020 and analyze its spatial and temporal characteristics and influencing factors. The results show that (1) temporally, the EWP in the TGRA shows an increasing trend from 2010 to 2020, but the overall level is low. Spatially, it shows a high pattern in the east and low in the west, and spatial differences are gradually decreasing; (2) ecological economic efficiency is significantly lower than economic well-being efficiency, and ecological economic efficiency is the main reason limiting the improvement in EWP in the TGRA. The ecological well-being situation of the TGRA is not optimistic; (3) there is an overall problem of excessive ecological input and insufficient per-capita GDP and well-being output in the TGRA, and decisions should be made according to local conditions; (4) the level of economic development has an EWP level that plays a dominant role and also has a greater relationship with the policy system, socioeconomic conditions, and natural environment.