ABSTRACT
Rural industrialization has been a critical movement for rural development in China. Marketization had provided once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for township-village enterprises to grow and flourish since the late 1970s. Bottom-up rural nonagricultural development shows intriguing patterns of intensive mixture of agricultural and nonagricultural land uses, suggesting highly fragmented in situ urbanization. The spatial pattern of land uses shows a mixture of agricultural and nonagricultural ones, suggesting an intriguing pattern of development. Built environments are created within an institutional structure where land rights in a setting of high population density and acute land scarcity are significantly formative. Rural nonagricultural growth is exogenous, depending on regional industrial advantages. One is that bottom-up nonagricultural developments occur on the collectively owned land, and the other is that rural entities could conduct development projects only within their own jurisdictions. Land rent is the value of land appropriated in economic transactions, as the market price of land is interpreted as capitalised land rent.
