With rural revitalization as China’s national policy priority, rural tourism has been promoted as a pathway to stimulate local economies and advance revitalization objectives. National and local governments have introduced policy measures to support rural tourism development. However, the spatial correspondence between documented policy attention and tourism popularity remains uneven and insufficiently understood. To address this gap, this study develops an integrated evaluation framework combining a text-based measure of documented policy attention, denoted PII, and a Tourism Popularity Index (TPI) using multi-source data from 920 peri-urban villages in Shanghai with rural tourism destination POIs. Spatial analysis reveals disparities between tourism popularity and documented policy attention, and further examines the contextual characteristics associated with this misalignment. The findings indicate that: (1) documented policy attention and rural tourism popularity exhibit pronounced spatial disparities, with high-popularity clusters emerging where favorable resource conditions, accessibility, and higher levels of policy attention coexist; (2) widespread policy–popularity mismatches indicate limited correspondence between the two measures; (3) the selected cases illustrate differences in spatial planning, operational capacity, and market-oriented strategies, cautioning against uniform policy expansion. The study offers a spatially explicit framework for assessing policy–popularity alignment and informing context-sensitive rural tourism governance in highly urbanized regions.

As China’s urban–rural interactions deepen, bidirectional flows of production factors reshape rural functions and social relations, giving rise to rural gentrification. The existing rural gentrification literature has focused primarily on middle-class migration and class displacement, and despite growing recognition of non-migratory external engagement in rural China, production-system restructuring in this context remains underexplored. This study selected three representative villages in Nanjing, China, for comparative case analysis and used multi-temporal point of interest (POI) and cross-sectional enterprise registration data to examine the common patterns, differentiated pathways, and formation mechanisms of production-system restructuring during rural gentrification. The results showed that rural industries, resources, and spaces were reconfigured for consumer and experiential uses as production and business activities expanded and business formats diversified, with the organizational composition of registered business entities differing across villages. Differences in production activity and business entity structures corresponded to industry extension, holistic insertion, and progressive embedding. Their formation mechanism can be summarized as the sustained integration of urban–rural flows with local production foundations. By incorporating production-system restructuring into rural gentrification analysis, this study extended conventional analysis centered on population migration and class displacement. It provided Chinese evidence for understanding diverse rural gentrification pathways in the Global South.