Enhancing rural resilience through the rural revitalisation strategy in rural China: Evidence from Wushi Village, Hunan Province

Abstract

To date, China’s Rural Revitalisation Strategy (RRS) has achieved remarkable results; however, the model’s contribution to rural resilience has been underexplored. This study proposes a framework for enhancing rural resilience in the context of the RRS, using Wushi Village in Hunan Province as a case study to reveal practical pathways to enhance village resilience within the RRS framework. The empirical evidence shows that Wushi Village has improved its resilience through the RRS. First, critical investments in the economic domain facilitated its rapid economic capital development and generated chain effects across the social, cultural, ecological and political domains, promoting Wushi Village’s resilience to reach equilibrium. This finding challenges the notion of strengthening rural resilience as a zero-sum game as proposed by Wilson et al.(2018). Second, this study further develops three critical pathways to enhance village resilience in Wushi Village including multifunctional transformation, combined bottom-up and top-down planning and internal–external joint social network, as different stakeholders play critical roles in enhancing rural resilience in the narrative of Wushi Village. Therefore, our study offers a new perspective on the framework of rural resilience studies and identifies the mechanism of rural resilience enhancement under the RRS.