Imbalances in allocating public service resources are a universal problem worldwide, especially in urban and rural areas. As a developing country with a significant imbalance between urban and rural areas, China is representative of the unbalanced allocation of public service resources. Presently, China has entered the county urbanization stage. Therefore, this study can provide a new way to realize the equalization of urban and rural public services with the county as the basic unit. Taking counties as the primary study area, this paper analyzes the new trends of population mobility in China’s counties. It combines large-scale questionnaires and field surveys to investigate the new demand of rural residents for public services and the shortcomings of public service resource allocation. First, the county seat attracts a concentration of the county’s rural residents and returning population, whose high expectations for the county seat’s education and medical services have not yet been met. Second, the township assumes the vital function of elementary school education and medical services in rural areas, and the rural children have a great demand for elementary school education services in the township. However, there are still apparent shortcomings in support of teaching facilities and the quality of education services. Third, the problem of aging and hollowing out in rural areas is serious, and the education, medical and elderly service needs of left-behind children and the elderly are difficult to be guaranteed. Finally, this paper proposes targeted planning strategies and policy recommendations for allocating county public service resources at three levels based on the “county–town–village” hierarchy.

With the continuous development of social governance research and practice, the role of public participation in community planning has received increasing attention. In some developing countries, the public participation methods used in Western countries show a certain degree of inadaptability. The underlying reason for this is the lack of understanding of the related concepts and participation units of public participation and the lack of a scientific public participation system. This study first investigated the fundamental issues of public participation system construction and the definition of a public participation unit in community planning. Then, the micro-renovation of the Zengcuoan community in Xiamen, China, was used as an example to introduce the whole process of constructing a public participation system and an inverted pyramid model of public participation units. Collaborative workshops are a method of community planning that is government-guided and allows for multistakeholder participation and joint consultation. These workshops are mainly led by relevant government departments or social autonomous organizations. They adopt a flexible and diverse approach in response to problems and needs in the process of community construction and development that mobilizes and organizes residents and community organizations to participate in community construction and governance. Collaborative workshops provide new working ideas and practical solutions for participatory community planning in both top-down (government-led) and bottom-up (citizen-led) settings in developing countries.

Existing studies have attempted to explain the transformation of rural China from a single productive or post-productive perspective. However, regarding the two development paradigms as binary opposites brings contradictions: Is China’s countryside evolving towards productivism or post-productivism? To answer this question, we transcend the binary opposition and instead propose an analytical framework based on rural value, driving actors, and rural land-use functions. Based on the location quotient analysis method, we measure the functional hybridity of rural areas using 7345 POIs (points of interest) representing the land-use types of productive and post-productive activities. We discuss the formation mechanism of functional hybridity considering two typical spaces: modern agriculture demonstration districts and “Tesecun”. We find that the government, the market, and villagers collectively promote the formation of functional hybridity in rural China. The government prefers to strengthen productivity in order to ensure state food security, while villagers prefer to make their villages more multi-functional in order to attract citizens. This study can be seen as a contribution supplementing research issues associated with rural China from the novel dualistic perspective of productivism and post-productivism.

Increasing economic integration between countries has spurred the rapid growth of border areas. However, whether city-level boundary areas can benefit from regional integrations within one regime is unknown. Along with growing numbers of integrated regions in developing economies, especially in China, understanding the extent to which geographic growth and location conditions play roles in the process is of great importance. Therefore, this study used night-time light data between 2013 and 2018 to investigate the growth patterns of different parts of the highly integrated Pearl River Delta (PRD) of China. The results showed that border areas, especially those with emerging economies, grew faster than city centers during the study period. Moreover, we built ordinary least square (OLS) regression and spatial econometrics models to understand how location conditions across the two cities affected the growth process. The models showed that the urbanization levels across the two cities had inverted U-shaped effects on the growth of border areas. The social security costs also exhibited negative effects. The study findings can help policymakers better understand emerging growth areas and, accordingly, deploy appropriate policies to overcome the obstacles to the integration process and ensure equity in development opportunities.

As urbanization accelerates, the evolving dynamics of village growth and decline have garnered widespread attention. Rural housing, as the most significant asset in villages, serves as the primary indicator of socio-economic development in rural areas. However, the extensive scale, diversity, and widespread distribution of villages make conducting a nationwide census of rural buildings a notably costly and time-intensive endeavor. Although deep learning techniques have been successfully applied by numerous researchers to map building footprints, the majority of this work is concentrated in urban areas, leaving large-scale datasets for rural buildings notably lacking. In this article, an exhaustive database of rural architecture has been established, featuring diverse rural building annotations from the majority of provinces in mainland China. Moreover, a real- time online platform for remote sensing image interpretation, integrating instance segmentation and boundary regularization, has been developed to streamline the extraction of building footprints from high-resolution imagery. Experimental results from predicting 43,992 rural building instances nationwide demonstrated that 33,210 were accurately identified, achieving a precision of 0.776, a recall of 0.755, and an F1 score of 0.765. Building upon this work, the maps of rural building areas and quantity are produced to clearly demonstrate the distribution of rural houses in parts of China. These data products can serve as vital supplements to public data products such as nighttime light data, land cover maps, national statistical yearbooks, and road network data, particularly in the field of rural studies.