Human geography research based on the new thinking of global rural-urban relationship

Sustainable rural development is critical to the achievement of global sustainable development goals. Globalization and urbanization, as the key processes, continuously drive the human-earth system to make adaptive responses, promoting the transformation of urban-rural relations. The rural-urban relationship is essentially a mother-child relationship, which is a comprehensive characterization of the transfer of rural humanistic factors, the transformation of man-land relationship and the transformation of urban-rural development in the process of urbanization. However, the traditional cognition of urban-rural relationship ignores the multi-dimensional connections between the rural and the urban as well as the existence of the rural-urban integration system, resulting in prominent drawbacks of rural regions, negatively affecting the urban-rural development rights, and resulting in urban and rural territorial dysfunction and other problems. The key to solve the problems of socio-economic development in China is to reform the urban-biased development strategy, and to innovate the new cognition of rural-urban relationship based on the thinking of "rural maternal effect", which highlights that rural areas nourish the city. Based on the remote coupling and systematic synthesis of the rural human-earth system, modern human geography urgently needs to strengthen the cross-research with physical geography and information geography, create a coordinated observation system of human-earth system supported by the sky-space-ground integration, reshape the global rural development perspective, rural-urban system perspective, and reorganize the global rural human-earth relationship, the rural-urban integration relationship, and the living and employment relationship. Rural human-earth relationship territorial system is the core of rural geography research. The rural human-earth system research should focus on the coupling of rural natural ecosystem and the socio-economic system and their complex interactive processes and effects. Supported by the intersection of multiple disciplines, the expansion of new fields and the cultivation of new disciplines, it should create the collaborative observation technology of human-earth system and methodology of multi-source data fusion computing, the research idea based on process-mechanism-pattern and the technical path of monitoring-simulation-decision support, and explore the organic connection path between rural human-earth system coupling and rural-urban integrated development, regional sustainable development and global common governance. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.