Abstract:
Under the context of the continuous advancement of the rural revitalization strategy and the indepth implementation of the ‘Harmonious and Beautiful Village' initiative, the policy focus of rural construction in China is gradually shifting from individual-village demonstration to categorized orderly development, regional coordinated governance, and cluster-based promotion. While relevant studies have been growing, existing literature still suffers from fragmented research themes, insufficient mechanistic explanations, and overly principled planning responses. This paper takes rural cluster development as the research subject, adopts a combined method of bibliometrics and content analysis, and systematically analyzes the spatial organizational mechanism of rural clusters on the basis of sorting out relevant policy evolution and existing research foundations. It summarizes the formation mechanism of rural clusters: the shift of policy scales removes institutional barriers for cross-village flow of production factors, and the cross-village reorganization of population, land, industry, public services and operational resources gives rise to a multi-dimensional functional network. Such network synergy further promotes the formation of a spatial structure and regional community, with central villages as the core, surrounding villages as nodes, and the entire network interconnected. The study reveals that a rural cluster is not a simple amalgamation of adjacent villages, but a meso-scale spatial organization process jointly shaped by policy guidance, factor flow, functional division and governance coordination.