Taiyang Zhong

Nanjing University | NJU · School of Geography and Ocean Science

While land revenue has played an important role in China’s fiscal revenue and expenditure, little is known of the linkage between land revenue and rural infrastructure inputs and its impact on the landscape of fiscal spending on rural infrastructure. To investigate this further, we study the effect of land finance on rural infrastructure inputs by...

Chinese cities have been able to maintain much higher levels of household food security than many other cities in the Global South, according to recent surveys. Yet, little is known about the governance of the food provisioning system that underpins its urban food security. Based on a combination of household survey data, unstructured interviews an...

State-led efforts of food localization have been conducted across mainland China under the umbrella of Vegetable Basket Project since the end of the 1980s, with the purpose of addressing urban food security. Food localization as a counter movement to globalization has been extensively studied for its debatable role in promoting the sustainability o...

Food subsidies are widely implemented as part of government policies globally to mitigate food insecurity amongst the urban poor. Subsidies to retail outlets are one a type of supply-side subsidy designed to make food more affordable to low-income consumers. China's Affordable Food Shop (AFS) program introduced by the central government in 2011 and...

The Requisition-Compensation Balance of Farmland (RCBF) policy remedies the situation where valuable farmland becomes occupied for non-agricultural objectives during the rapid urbanization in China. However, there has been little systematic and provincial research on the RCBF policy. This study explores the establishment of an optimized and differe...

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 caused extensive impact on household income and foods consumption. However, little attention has been paid to the immediate impact of income loss on animal-source foods consumption in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to narrow this gap, and a total of 1301 valid samples of household food con...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has elicited a range of public health governance responses. One common result has been an associated disruption of food supply chains and growing urban food insecurity. Policy responses to this situation have not yet received sufficient research attention. This paper therefore focuses on the urban food security implicat...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has issued significant challenges to food systems and the food security of migrants in cities. In China, there have been no studies to date focusing on the food security of migrants during the pandemic. To fill this gap, an online questionnaire survey of food security in Nanjing City, China, was conducted in March 2020. This p...

Purchasing food from community-level grassroots organizations was a novel and unforgettable experience for Wuhan residents during the COVID-19 lockdown, but little attention was paid to it. The study examined the relationship between community-level grassroots organizations and household food insecurity based on an online survey of household food i...

For the real estate market, housing prices as well as housing vacancy rates (HVRs) are key indicators. However, for the latter indicator, there is no official data set for Chinese cities. Collecting HVR in a traditional way requires enormous personnel efforts and is therefore very expensive and time consuming. In this study, we introduce a framewor...

Since the 2000s, there has been an increasing number of returning and migrant farmers across China. In 2012, China initiated a program for fostering professional farmers, which has caused greater changes for farmers and led to an agricultural shift towards commercial production. Migration has been recognized as a crucial factor affecting the divers...

This paper examines the relationship between the rapid growth of online food purchasing and household food security during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in China using the city of Nanjing as a case study. The paper presents the results of an online survey of 968 households in Nanjing in March 2020 focused on their food purchasing behavior...

Food systems, including supply chains, account for approximately one-third of global anthropogenic GHGs emissions. We construct a bottom-up GHG inventory of China’s food system from farm to fork for the period 1990–2018. The decomposition method is used to assess regional differentiated drivers. GHG emissions reduced by 6.8% between 1990 and 2000 d...

Southern China, which boasts high-yielding rice multi-crop systems, has long produced most of China’s rice. However, its ability to feed China has been weakened by changing rice cropping patterns in recent decades. In this study, we first examine production loss ascribed to rice multi-crop change in the south during 1998–2016 using agricultural sta...

Like many emerging economies in the Global South, China is experiencing major transformations of its national and local food system characterized by the rise of supermarkets. There has been an ongoing debate on the relationship between supermarkets and wet markets in developing countries. Drawing on data from a city-wide supermarket mapping and sur...

Food system planning is important to achieve the goal of “zero hunger” in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2016). However, discussion about comprehensive planning for food security is scarce and little is known about the situation in Chinese cities. To narrow this gap, this study collected and analyzed four medium-term plans an...

Motivation Detailed empirical work on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food security is scant. Local management of food security has received little attention. Purpose This paper describes emergency food policies in Wuhan and Nanjing, China during lockdown in 2020 and their implications for household food security in the two cities. Methods...

Background: In coping with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, cities adopted social isolation and lockdown measures; however, little is known about the impacts of these restrictions on household food security. Objective: This study provides a timely assessment of household food insecurity (HFI) in the Chinese city of Wuhan during...

There has been limited research examining the impact of the top-down and quota-oriented farmland preservation policies on urban land expansion at the city level in China. This paper aims to narrow this gap, particularly focusing on the policies of prime farmland preservation quota and farmland conversion quota. A multilevel modeling approach was ap...

Plastic greenhouses are an important hallmark of agricultural progress. To meet the growing demand for vegetable and food, the amount of plastic greenhouses has increased significantly over the past few decades. Remote sensing is considered as a promising data source for taking inventory and Monitoring plastic greenhouses for managing modern agricu...

Previous studies pay little attention to the role of technological progress in measuring urban land use efficiency, and ignore the interactions among total factor productivity, technological progress, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency in the process of urban land use. To narrow the gaps, this research uses the Malmquist index approach...

Dynamic urbanization processes have caused great changes on China’s urban spatial pattern and hierarchical structure in the past few decades. In this study, we propose new metrics for measuring the pattern of urban land by considering both, spatial distribution and hierarchical structure of the urban system. The metrics are deduced from Christaller...

Annual land use plan (ALUP) stands for the quota allocation of land converted to non-agricultural use, which has been in place since 1987 in China. Although the ALUP has been implemented for more than 30 years and has played an important role in China's non-agricultural land growth management, little has been done to assess the effect of its implem...

The excessive planning and construction of new cities and towns as well the massive expansion of planned settlement areas in China reveals a surprising phenomenon: extensive newly constructed areas that are characterized by severe under capacity. This phenomenon is described as “ghost city” and usually appears at the intra-urban scale. However, cur...

The central government of China required local governments to allow street food vending on May 27, 2020, which is essentially a policy of “informalization” in urban food governance. Before this, some local governments such as Nanjing Municipal Government had already relaxed the implementation of regulations for street food vending. The original pur...

The dynamic urbanization process of China has stimulated a massive growth of urban settlements in the past few decades. With the development of remote sensing technology and the release of the long-time Landsat archive, spatial characteristics of urban settlement are gradually analyzed on a large scale, and various patterns are developed for descri...

Plastic greenhouses are an important hallmark of agricultural progress. To meet the growing demand for vegetable and food, the amount of plastic greenhouses has increased significantly over the past few decades. Remote sensing is considered as a promising data source for taking inventory and monitoring plastic greenhouses for managing modern agricu...

Wet markets play an important role in urban food security in many Asian countries. Although the American Planning Association (APA) proposed in 2007 that food planning should focus on the business status and potential of food retailing, existing research pays more attention to the food accessibility of urban residents and limited research has been...

In the Global South, the informal food economy is both a source of income for disadvantaged urban groups and an accessible source of food for consumers. Yet, governance of this economy has commonly been restrictive among Southern countries including China. Consequently, in China there has been an antagonistic relationship between vendors and chengg...

China has experienced notable loss of farmland and increase in food imports during the past three decades. This article provides an econometric examination of the interactions between virtual land use through food trade and farmland loss in China. The results show that net virtual land imports have grown from 2.37 million hectares (Mha) in 1987 to...

This study investigated the influence of the proximity to wet markets and supermarkets on urban household dietary diversity in Nanjing. Based on the data collected through a citywide survey in 2015 and the map data of wet markets and supermarkets, the Poisson regression model was deployed to examine the correlations between geographical proximity t...

The landscape of China’s rural land market has been changed by several significant land right reforms since the 1970s. It is always of great interest to both the government and the public to gauge the effectiveness of these reforms. We address this question by investigating the impact of a recent land use right reform, namely, the ‘Three Rights Sep...

This report on the state of food security in Nanjing, China, is based on a 2015 city-wide survey conducted by Nanjing University and the Hungry Cities Partnership. The research found that most of the city’s residents are food secure, with access to desirable foods and high dietary diversity throughout the year. Nanjing has a high level of economic...

Food safety is an important issue in the world. This study assessed the health risk for the Chinese public when consuming vegetables grown in China, based on 1335 data records from 220 published papers during 2007-2016. The results showed that the average of Pb, Cd, and Hg concentration in vegetables was 0.106, 0.041, and 0.008 mg/kg, which were lo...

Although the National General Land Use Plan (1997-2010) came into effect in 1999, there has been no research investigating whether the farmland protection planning embedded within the top-down general land-use plans has contributed to promoting intensive utilization of urban land. This paper aims to assess the impact of farmland preservation effort...

Land use planning is a comprehensive instrument for managing non-agricultural land growth in China, and the evaluation of its implementation effect on growth control is of great significance for policy improvement. However, little empirical research has been done to estimate its implementation effect at the city level of the whole country. This stu...

High Cu contamination in agricultural soil can cause toxicity, leading to ecological damages. Thus, we need to understand the concentration level, contaminated area, and spatial distribution of Cu in agricultural soils on a regional or national scale. This paper reviewed the studies on Cu concentrations throughout Chinese agricultural soils, based...

Since 1978, China has experienced a rapid loss of arable land, leading to centralizing of farmland protection policies. To understand the growing centralization, this paper has used the lens of the interactions among (1) unwillingness to protect farmland among diverse actors, (2) policy failure and (3) policy change. The growing centralization is a...

Although land conveyance fees have accounted for a large portion of local governments' fiscal revenues and have been associated with rapid urban land expansion in China during the past two decades, little attention has been paid to the effect of land revenue on urban development intensity in China. This study focuses on the linkage between land rev...

Identification of the sources of soil mercury (Hg) on the provincial scale is helpful for enacting effective policies to prevent further contamination and take reclamation measurements. The natural and anthropogenic sources and their contributions of Hg in Chinese farmland soil were identified based on a decision tree method. The results showed tha...

China has experienced enormous changes in land use in recent decades, which are largely driven by its unparalleled economic development. We analyze changes in vegetation and soil carbon storage between 1990 and 2010 resulting from combinations of land-use category conversion and management. Results demonstrate a major decline in grasslands (−6.85%;...

Soil mercury (Hg) pollution in some areas of China is a serious problem and has aroused a lot of attention on a local scale. However, there are few studies on Hg pollution on a national scale. This study collected 444 published papers during 2005–2015 on Hg concentrations in agricultural soil throughout China, under seven land uses, namely: dry lan...

The present study collected 464 peer-reviewed articles on chromium (Cr) concentrations throughout China from the published papers during 2005–2013, to evaluate the influence of Cr concentrations in arable soil on food production in China. The collected Cr concentrations in Chinese arable soil ranged from 0.05 to 3353.60 mg/kg, with a standard devia...

Assessment on the effect of land use policy implementation research is of great significance for improving the implementation of policy. The majority of studies are insufficient in evaluating the implementation effect on cities in China. Based on the fact that increasing use of arable land for construction purposes is the primary cause of arable la...

The cultivated land intensive use (CLIU) is related to food security, supply of agricultural products, and even economic and social sustainable development. There is important theoretical and practical significance in deeply understanding the condition of CLIU and its change process, pattern, mechanism and comprehensive effect. The paper, by adopti...

The pollution and potential health risk due to lifetime exposure to heavy metals in urban soil of China were evaluated, based on the urban soil samples collected from published papers from 2005 to 2014. The contamination levels were in the order of Cd > Hg > Cu > Zn > Pb >As > Ni > Cr, and Hg and Cd fell into the category of “moderately contaminate...

Food safety is a major concern for the Chinese public. This study collected 465 published papers on heavy metal pollution rates (the ratio of the samples exceeding the Grade II limits for Chinese soils, the Soil Environmental Quality Standard-1995) in farmland soil throughout China. The results showed that Cd had the highest pollution rate of 7.75%...

Arsenic (As) is a major global environmental pollutant due to its high toxicity on human and animal health. This study collected 427 relevant papers to study As concentrations in Chinese arable soil and evaluate the health risk of exposure to As for humans. Results showed that the average of As concentration was 9.46 mg/kg in Chinese arable soil. S...

Lead (Pb) contamination in arable soils is one of the most serious ecological problems due to its high toxicity on human health. Thus, we need to understand the concentration level, contaminated area and spatial distribution of Pb in arable soils on regional or national scale. This paper reviewed the studies on Pb concentrations throughout Chinese...

Cadmium (Cd) concentration in arable soil has drawn broad public attention due to its direct effect on Cd concentration in food. However, there have been few studies of surveying Cd accumulation on the national scale in China. This paper collected 486 studies of Cd concentrations in Chinese arable soil. The results showed that the average Cd concen...

In order to assess the implementation of China's National General Land Use Plan (1997–2010), this study combined conformance-based and performance-based criteria. The conformance analysis was carried out by contrasting outcomes with planning goals. Regarding the performance-based criteria, this study focuses on the role of decision-making elements...

While China's central government has adopted remote sensing technology in land inspection since 2000, little empirical research has been done on its effect. This study aims to measure the effect of satellite imagery-based land inspection (SIBI) on illegal farmland conversion. The data used in this study were collected for the period from 1997 to 20...

Unexploited land change is a main driver of regional eco-environment change. Through an integrated technique of geographic information system (GIS), remote sensing (RS), and global positioning system (GPS), the authors attempted to address this topic by examining unexploited land conversion in Guiyang City in Guizhou province in southwestern China...

Soil salinization has become a global concern and poses a great threat to food production and sustainable land use. Land use policies are the main driver of saline soil farmland use in ecosystems. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for analyzing how saline soil farmland use is affected by land use practices of individual farm households. A...

Through the matching relationship between land use types and carbon emission items, this paper estimated carbon emissions of different land use types in Nanjing City, China and analyzed the influencing factors of carbon emissions by Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) model. The main conclusions are as follows: 1) Total anthropogenic carbon emiss...

Urbanization is regarded to be one of the most important factors driving land use change. In this paper, through an integrated technique of RS, GIS and GPS, unexploited land conversion has been unveiled from 1996-2010 in Guiyang and further examination has been made on the impact of urbanization on unexploited land change. And based on the adjustme...

Urban carbon footprint reflects the impact and pressure of human activities on urban environment. Based on city level, this paper estimated carbon emissions and carbon footprint of Nanjing city, analyzed urban carbon footprint intensity and carbon cycle pressure and discussed the influencing factors of carbon footprint through LMDI decomposition mo...

Based on the domestic and foreign published papers about soil heavy metal contents, the present study explored the spatial variations of heavy metal contents in agricultural soil in China. Totally, 173 studies on soil Pb, 138 on Cd, 156 on Cu, 139 on Zn and 140 on Cr were collected. Firstly, the abnormal values were selected and removed, then the s...

Here, we describe research on farmland fragmentation using the summary and comparison analysis approaches. The definition of farmland fragmentation, main research fields and measurement methods are reviewed. The connotation of farmland fragmentation is clear and has been widely recognized, but methods for determining fragmentation require further w...

In the first, the paper gave a retrospective analysis on the comprehensive assessment of circular economic development. According to the requirement of improving resource & environment efficiency, the paper designed an analytical framework for a comprehensive assessment of regional circular economic growth, which consists of the goal, object and te...

Climate change is affecting agricultural production and is expected to continue reducing water availability, potentially necessitating adaptation adjustment by related sectors to maintain sustainability of saline land use system highly vulnerable to water shortages. The drought in 2010 impacted the salt-affected land use system of the coastal regio...

Off-shall seawater in China was often polluted and eutrophicated more or less because of human activities. The ecosystem services could be incorporated into the decision-making process by managers only if the ecosystem services were economically marked. Therefore, it was important to evaluate the value of ecosystem service (VES) and service value l...

Through the 1058 rural households' questionnaire survey in16 villages of Shanghai, Jiangsu and Anhui Provinces, it is discovered that the profit rate of cash crops is higher than that of food crops with the development of agricultural market economy. On the basis of quantitative analysis and expanded CD model test, the input behavior of production...