Globally speaking, Asian countries, especially East Asian countries, are facing acute national depopulation situation and severe rural shrinkage development. Based on the continuous surveys of town and village development in Japan, South Korea, and China, this study aims to provide an overview of social policies that have been implemented in the past or more recently in these three countries in response to rural shrinkage, and to outline the core philosophy of these practices to cope with the repercussions. In this paper, we analyze the overall process of rural depopulation and the present features of town and village development in three countries. We subsequently present the social policies over the last few decades and summarize them into four major groups. Furthermore, we highlight that the focus of social policies is not to seek possible ways to reestablish growth but to provide positive support and effective reform to adjust and satisfy the changing needs of towns and villages under the circumstances of shrinking development, including the optimization of public resource allocation, exploring institutional innovation to valorize abandoned assets, and developing endogenous potentials for future sustainable development. Qualitative methods from a combination of literature review, policy review, and field surveys have mainly been adopted in this research. The study of East Asian practices may be instructive for other Asia-Pacific countries, as well as European countries that have been experiencing or will eventually face the challenges of rural shrinkage.

On the basis of fully understanding the key characteristics and problems of China’s township master plans, this article clarifies the requirements of the territorial spatial planning system reform for the governance system of townships and towns, urban–rural integration and high-quality development, and points out the necessity of overall planning for township-level territorial spaces in China. Then, based on the study of international experience and the division of administrative powers between county-level government and township-level government, it proposes the positioning features of overall planning for township-level territorial spaces, including the communication and implementation of municipal and county planning, innovating the control methods concerning the use of town seat space, and coordinating and guiding the formulation of detailed plans. It also indicates that the key content of overall planning for township-level territorial spaces must include natural resource management, development and utilization of territorial spaces, spatial pattern of town areas, spatial layout of town seats, management and control of village construction, etc.

Traditional sociological theory explains that a rural community is an enclosed unit. China's fast modernization and urbanization, however, displays a rather different phenomenon, where rural communities are changing into open communities, which face the dual task of rebuilding internal relations and expanding external resources. Based on this background and practical cognition, the theoretical framework of the 'new rural communitas' is proposed, which expands the common enclosed relationships in traditional rural communities into new, open coconstruction relationships with endogenous power as core, government power as support, and social power as coordination, emphasizing the full cooperation of these three types of power. On the basis of the theory, this article employs the practice of the rural regeneration policy in Taiwan as an empirical case, and analyzes how these three types of power affect and cooperate with each other. Furthermore, interviews have been conducted with local community members, government officers and social participants in three communities in Taiwan to give examples of three different types of new rural communitas. Finally, several suggestions toward constructing new rural communitas are discussed.