From Single Villages to Village Clusters: Rescaling Rural Heritage Governance in Guilin, China

As China’s rural revitalization agenda shifts from rescue to integrated development, single-village strategies often struggle to coordinate cross-village resources, regional markets, and multilevel governance. Using 354 characteristic villages in Guilin, China, 76.8% of which lie 60 or more minutes’ drive from the nearest major regional service node, this article combines spatial statistics, accessibility analysis, and comparative case studies to examine how peripherality and clustering reshape the governance scale that revitalization requires. The findings show, first, that these villages are significantly clustered at every scale between 4 and 40 km, with peripheral villages clustering more strongly than the village system as a whole at every distance band. Second, peripheral clustering generates two problems at once—the constraint peripherality places on factor mobility, and competition among adjacent villages holding homogeneous resources—neither of which a single village can address, producing scale mismatches in resource organization, market organization, and governance organization. Third, addressing them requires two capabilities that ordinarily sit at different tiers: unified jurisdiction over resources spanning several administrative villages, at county level, and incorporation of such a unit into cross-county transport, tourism, and branding systems, at municipal level. City-county governance is thus a configuration of capabilities rather than a position in an administrative ranking; across the cases, cross-village designation proved abundant while an organizational form able to receive it proved scarce. Rural heritage revitalization is accordingly a problem of matching the scale at which development issues emerge to the scale at which governance responds, and the article specifies criteria by which that match can be tested elsewhere.