Rapid industrialization and urbanization have induced great transformations in rural China. As a developing country with a vast rural population, China faces the persistent challenge of uneven development, and rural areas lag behind their urban counterparts, hindering the country’s modernization process. The relationship between the rural population and land use plays a key role in reflecting these disparities. Understanding these dynamics and coordinating rural human-land interactions is essential for advancing urban-rural integration and promoting rural revitalization. However, studies on the long-term dynamics and future trajectories of rural human–land relationships at the national scale remain limited. This study addresses these gaps by examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of rural residential land (2000–2020) using landscape metrics along the rural–urban gradient, assessing rural human-land relations via per capita residential land and the Tapio decoupling model, and projecting future trajectories (2020–2050). The results indicate that: (1) Over the past two decades, rural residential land has expanded mainly through edge-expansion, accompanied by pockets of leapfrog growth. Along the rural–urban gradient, mean patch area increased, and spatial aggregation intensified while fragmentation decreased, though patch shapes became more irregular. (2) Per capita rural residential land nearly doubled during 2000–2020, with 97.18% of cities nationwide experiencing expansion, and the growth was particularly significant in northern China. (3) A total of 79.66% of cities exhibit a pronounced, strong negative decoupling in rural human-land relationships, where shrinking rural populations coincide with expanding residential land areas. (4) Projections indicate that strong negative decoupling will intensify, with 52.02% of cities experiencing it between 2020 and 2030 and 71.31% between 2030 and 2050. To address this divergence, this study identifies four major zones and nine subzones based on distinct demographic, ecological, and socioeconomic conditions, and proposes targeted zone-priority measures. These research results provide valuable insights for promoting a more balanced, efficient, and sustainable development of the relationship between the rural population and land, and also offer references for the sustainable development of rural transformation in China.
Wang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.