With the accelerated urbanization and industrialization of China, the change of farmland and rural settlements, the two most important land-use types depicting rural development, brings about obvious impact on rural sustainability and the implementation of building new countryside strategy in China.

Since 2006, supported by the key project entitled “The Models of New Countryside Construction and the Ways of Sustainable Development in Eastern Coastal China”, which was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), a research team led by Prof. LIU Yansui from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academic Sciences, has been continuously working on the rural land-use change and its impact on building new countryside.

Taking the five indicators, i.e., topographic setting, land degradation risk, moisture, vegetation growing condition, and land use response of farmers into consideration, the method for assessing cultivated land quality is developed and the results indicated that cultivated land quality is significantly correlated with the spatial distribution of water resources, rural economic level, agricultural infrastructure investment, and the farming system.

Rapid urbanization and industrialization in southern Jiangsu Province have consumed a huge amount of arable land. However, the loss of arable land is weakly correlated with ecological service value, per capita net income of farmers, but positively with grain yield for some counties. Most areas in the study site have a low arable land depletion rate and a high potential for sustainable development. Rural settlements should be controlled and rationalized through legislative measures to achieve harmonious development between urban and rural areas.

To some extent, regional discrepancies, rural poverty, rural land-use issues and the present international environment are four major potential factors influencing the building of a new countryside in China. Currently, land consolidation is not a panacea for China’s rural land-use issues concerning building a new countryside, and the key problem is how to reemploy the surplus rural labors and resettle the land-loss farmers. More attentions should be paid to caring for farmers’ future livelihoods in the process of implementing the strategy.

Aiming at the research objectives and contents of the NSFC key project, this research team had published 16 papers in SCI/SSCI Journals in the last three years, and three more have been published this year in three international SSCI Journals with high impact factors (over 2.0): Applied Geography, Journal of Environmental Management and Land Use Policy.