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Comparing with cities, rural communities especially those declining rural communities have become vulnerable to natural disasters owing to their backward socioeconomic conditions. Taking Xun County of China's Henan Province as the study area, the paper aims to evaluate rural community resilience to flood by unveiling the connection between individuals' cognition, follow-up actions and the community resilience. Research results show that: (1) The logic chain exists as individual's cognition to disaster leads to their constructive actions to cope with disaster, which contribute to community resilience. (2) At the cognition dimension, individual's knowledge reserve of disaster prevention and their recognition to local authority are playing an important role in their decision making and follow-up behaviors when disaster occurs. (3) At the action dimension, individual's familiarity with the disaster preparedness, efficient information transmission when disaster occurs and villagers' following order and their unity of action all contribute to community resilience to disaster. The paper proposes ways to improve rural community resilience to disasters based on the research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid urbanization growth during the past decades which has highly promoted its affluence has induced various challenges for the countryside. The problem of rural decline of quite many villages which are suffering depopulation in turn challenges the urbanization sustainability in China. By way of in-depth historical and literature review, the paper finds distorted urban-rural relationship and the tendency of village decline owing to China's long time urban biased policy. By further investigating China's new-type urbanization strategy, the paper draws concerns about future rural development which is less mentioned in the plan. It calls for ruralization and actions to revitalize the countryside so as to be adapted to China's new-type urbanization plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has undergone a dramatic transition echoed the unprecedented urbanization and economic growth since the late 1970s. The current research on urbanization has overlooked the transformation consistency between urban and rural areas. Although the Chinese central government has focused on improving rural residents' livelihood, it is still far from achieving coordinated urban–rural development. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of China's urban–rural development transformation (URDT) based on three indicator systems, namely the urban–rural development level (URDL), the urban–rural structure level (URSL), and the urban–rural coordination level (URCL). Findings from this investigation show that universal and intense URDT has taken place in China over the last two decades. This has been accompanied by growth of URDL and URSL and deterioration of URCL. There are, however, obvious spatial disparities in the different aspects of URDT. The western and northeastern regions of China have experienced slower transformation than other regions between 1990 and 2010. Correlation analysis among the sub-index shows that coordinated urban–rural development needs a certain initial socioeconomic level and moderate changes of URDL and URSL. This paper suggests that more attentions should be paid to rural areas and lagging areas in central and western China. Given the regional disparities of URDT, the most effective way to achieve urban–rural integration in China is by taking the overall considerations of development policies of both region and urban–rural areas aimed at various urban–rural development transformation characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]