Ecological Challenges and Strategic Responses to China's Quantitative Rigidity of Cultivated Land Protection

ABSTRACT

Balancing food security and ecological sustainability has become a critical challenge for land governance in rapidly urbanizing countries. China has successfully maintained national cultivated land quantity through a comprehensive farmland protection regime. However, the sustainability implications of this quantity‐oriented approach remain insufficiently understood. This study examines China's cultivated land protection system from the perspective of spatial restructuring and its associated ecological consequences. The results reveal a pronounced shift of cultivated land from the economically developed southeastern region toward northern and northwestern China, a trend further reinforced by recent territorial spatial planning. While this redistribution helps maintain cultivated land quantity, it increasingly concentrates agricultural production in regions characterized by water scarcity, ecological fragility, and limited environmental carrying capacity. Consequently, growing mismatches emerge between cultivated land allocation, water‐resource endowment, population distribution, and ecological suitability. The findings suggest that the current protection regime has not eliminated ecological pressures but has progressively transferred them from developed regions to environmentally sensitive agricultural frontiers. This study contributes to the literature by shifting attention from cultivated land quantity to the spatial consequences of protection policies and introducing the concept of ecological risk transfer to explain the unintended socio‐ecological outcomes of quantity‐based land governance. The future challenge of cultivated land protection lies not in preventing farmland loss alone, but in ensuring the spatial sustainability of agricultural production. Accordingly, cultivated land governance should move beyond quantity preservation toward a more integrated framework emphasizing spatial optimization, farmland quality enhancement, and multilevel ecological compensation.