Agricultural Structure Adjustment and Rural Poverty Alleviation in the Agro-Pastoral Transition Zone of Northern China: A Case Study of Yulin City

Poverty restricts rural sustainable development and urban–rural integration. Agricultural development is an engine of rural economic development and poverty elimination. Agricultural structure adjustment and rural poverty alleviation in Yulin City from the agro-pastoral transition zone of Northern China were studied using statistical data. Our results showed that the rural poverty ratio in Yulin was 7.70% in 2017, with clearly higher trends in southeast regions and lower trends in northeast regions. Northern Yulin had a lower proportion of primary industry to gross domestic production and ratio of agriculture to animal husbandry than southern Yulin. The agricultural structure variability index and agricultural specialization index have changed little, while the actual growth rate of the rural per capita net income has dramatically declined in the last decade. The rural poverty ratio was positively correlated with proportion of primary industry and ratio of agriculture to animal husbandry. These results suggest that a reduced proportion of primary industry and animal husbandry development will promote rural poverty alleviation and future rural revitalization.

Life After Bunyan

This chapter explores the ‘church life’ of the Congregational meeting at Bedford during the two decades following the death in 1688 of its most famous pastor, John Bunyan, and the passing of the 1689 Toleration Act. It examines the difficult experience of pastoral transition facing the church under the early leadership of Bunyan’s successor, Ebenezer Chandler: the first pastor to be appointed from without the congregation since its establishment in the early 1650s, but about whom almost nothing has been written. This chapter addresses matters at the heart of the relationship between Dissenting pastors and their congregations in one of the most prominent and well-documented Congregational churches of the era, and during a key period in the transformation of English Dissent: from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, and from persecution to toleration, via the short-lived ‘Happy Union’ of Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the early 1690s.