Measurement of Rural Residents’ Mobility in Western China: A Case Study of Qingyang, Gansu Province

Mobility is a popular topic in the fields of humanities and social sciences. China’s rapid urbanization has resulted in the acceleration of urban–rural mobility. Moreover, the implementation of the New Urbanization and Rural Revitalization Strategy has demonstrated the prospects of urban–rural integration and development. However, research on rural mobility is mainly focused in the fields of economics and sociology, with insufficient attention paid to spatial mobility. The main purpose of this study is to introduce a new theoretical explanation of the four dimensions of rural mobility based on a complete understanding of the current socio-economic background, namely, network mobility, green mobility, people-oriented mobility, and smart mobility. On this basis, a rural mobility evaluation index system is proposed by attempting to build a synthetic rural mobility index from the four aforementioned dimensions. Qingyang, a typical city in Western China located in the Loess Hilly Region, is taken as an example. Accordingly, the comprehensive rural and four-dimensional mobilities are analyzed and evaluated, and the effectiveness of the index system is verified. Results show that Qingyang’s rural mobility is at a low level, but differences in the types of rural residents, districts and counties, and dimensions of mobility are observed. At the end of this paper, the inclusion of mobility promotion in the policy system of rural revitalization is emphasized.