Researchers have found that obtaining homesteads, even a small plot, can secure poor rural households with income and status. It wants to ensure rural households have free access to homesteads as a welfare benefit to them and to encourage rural households to obtain monetary benefits from homesteads as a way to boost rural income. Īside from the control of settlement expansion, China’s central government also hopes to achieve two additional goals with rural homesteads. Farmland keeps decreasing, while rural homesteads and houses continue to expand. These regulations, however, turned out to be ineffective.
The homestead withdraw system requires households to withdraw from their vacant homesteads or to give up their occupied homesteads and houses voluntarily and move into high-rise buildings with compensation. The homestead size control system sets size limits to the homestead plots allocated to rural households. The land quota system requires the minimum hectares of farmland preservation and the maximum hectares of urban and rural construction land for every province, city and county during a particular time frame, usually five, ten or fifteen years. These regulations include construction land quotas, homestead size control and the homestead withdrawal system.
Aware of these, China’s central government has launched a series of regulations since the 1980s to curb the trend of fast rural residential expansion.
These types of rapid rural settlement expansions raise several concerns of sustainability: they lower land use efficiency, inhibit agricultural land preservation, cause habitat degradation and threaten water quality and environmental diversity. The outward expansion is attested by the numbers cited in the previous paragraphs, and the fragmented development is caused by the tradition of rural households living in a low density and scattered fashion. The rural settlement expansion in China takes two forms: standard sprawl, i.e., the outward expansion and sprinkling, i.e., fragmented development.
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