Which Factors Affect Farmers’ Willingness for rural community remediation? A tale of three rural villages in China

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization in China, rural China is entering into a social and economic transformation period. As the national policy has shifted towards ensuring economic development while retaining considerable arable land, China has strictly controlled the conversion of agricultural land to construction land, with the amount of unused land diminishing. In this context, the search for new construction land has become an overwhelmingly urgent task. As a result, remediation of the rural community has gradually become an important choice for Chinese government. In this paper, we have investigated the characteristics of rural residential concentrations and factors affecting the willingness for rural community remediation in different regions of China by using the logistic regression method. A mutual influence model is built to provide a scientific basis for the reclamation and improvement of rural land. The results show that rural farmers in regions with different economic development levels have different preferences in large-scale operations and compensation method. 1) In line with the willingness to remediate (WtR), farmers in the western and central regions have significantly more WtR than those in the eastern region (eastern region < central region < western region) – being affected by large-scale operations rather than themselves and subcontracting/leasehold and, in terms of land mode, the influence of age, family income and compensation mode rather than contract land. 2) In terms of the mutual influence between different regions and large-scale operations, farmers from the eastern region have less WtR than those from western and central regions. 3) In terms of the mutual influence between different regions and the compensation level, farmers from the eastern region also has less WtR than those from western and central regions. The main reason for these differences is likely to be due to the eastern region being much more developed than the other two regions. While the more scattered central and western communities have little impact on living and production, farmers in the eastern region have more entrepreneur activities associated with their land and therefore generate more income, increasing their desire for more land and houses which made governments’ subsidies less attractive. The results could therefore provide a scientific basis and policy guidance for investigation of cooperative development of comprehensive rural community remediation in other regions with similar contexts.