**1. Introduction**

A significant challenge to mankind in this era is food security [1,2]. A report from FSIN (2018) indicates that 51 countries globally (approximately 124 million people) are encountering the issue of food insecurity as of 2017 [3]. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs) first and second concerns emphasize eradicating extreme levels of poverty through unrestricted access to sustainable food and nutrition for good health and well-being [4]. However, one needs agricultural land to produce food for sustainable development and ensure food security. Therefore, the relevance of accessing the determinants of land transfer, a booster of proper land use, has been a concern for scholars in agricultural economics and geography in developing nations such as China [5–8].

In the past few years, under the background of the reform of the rural property rights system, land transfer has developed fast in much countryside of China and has become an important factor activating rural lands of China and improving the revenue of peasants. This shows that China's rural land transfer institution has made phased achievements. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, by the end of 2016, the area of rural land transfer in China has achieved 471 million mu. The No.1 document of the Central Committee in 2019 emphasized: "improving the standardized management system of land transfer and developing various forms of moderate-scale agricultural operations". Predictably, with the in-depth promotion of the rural revitalization strategy and the acceleration of the pace of national agricultural modernization, the status of land fragmentation management can

**Citation:** Zhang, H.; Jin, R.; Ankrah Twumasi, M.; Xiao, S.; Chandio, A.A.; Sargani, G.R. How Does the Heterogeneity of Family Structure Affect the Area of Land Transferred Out in the Context of Rural Revitalization?—Experience from CHIP 2013. *Land* **2023**, *12*, 110. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land12010110

Academic Editors: Yongsheng Wang, Qi Wen, Dazhuan Ge and Bangbang Zhang

Received: 22 November 2022 Revised: 20 December 2022 Accepted: 27 December 2022 Published: 29 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

no longer meet the development needs of scalable, modern, and intelligent agriculture. Undoubtedly, the scale of land transfer will expand continually in the future. In the context of the continuous introduction of various favorable policies for benefiting peasants at the central and local levels, more and more peasants have realized the value of the land.

On the one hand, wealthy families can reach scalable management by land transfer and benefit from land appreciation. On the other hand, rural families with relatively low human capital can transfer their free land to obtain some rent. Thus, what impact will the heterogeneity of family structure have on land transfer? Based on the view of supply and demand of land transfer, some scholars found that land transfer may result in widening income disparities within rural areas [9–11]. Some scholars have specifically analyzed the influence of political capital on the willingness of rural land transformation and found that village cadres have more power advantages in the process of rural land transfer [12,13]. Land transferred out is the front-end link of land transfer; the discussion of all related issues, including the "elite capture" of land transfer, inevitably needs to be placed in the land transferred out link; however, the impact of family structure heterogeneity on the area of land transferred out as the front end of land transfer is one of the more core issues. This paper focuses on the following two research questions. First, in the process of rural land transfer, are elite families more likely to transfer out of the land compared to non-elite families? Will it further aggravate the "Matthew effect" between the rich and the poor in rural areas? Second, within the rural elite families, is there heterogeneity between party members and grassroots cadres that then affect the area of land transfer? Undoubtedly, in the context of rural revitalization, with the combination of various types of capital and the land, research on the effect of family structure heterogeneity on land transfer area and the conclusions are conducive to better grasping the front-end of land transfer, maintaining the stability of the order of land transfer, helping local governments to resolve various contradictions and disputes caused by land transfer, maintaining local harmony and stability, and, thus, maintaining the economic and social achievements of building a well-off society in an all-round way.
