The outflow of the rural population has become a prevalent phenomenon on a global scale under the influence of urbanization. Rural hollowing out, thereby leading to brain drain and rural decline, is placing small villages in a severe predicament regarding their existence and development (Drozdzewski, 2008; Lall et al., 2006). Currently, China is encountering the same dilemma: the perennial urban priority has become the culprit of hallowing out, acutely pumping the rural labor force empty (Murphy, 2002; Su et al., 2018). To elucidate why rural residents are inclined to pursue urban life rather than stay and serve their homelands, some researchers ponder how subjective elements affect human decision-making processes for migration. They pay attention to individual perceptions and attitudes toward the environment in which they reside (Pretty et al., 2006; Simões et al., 2020). Hence, the concept of place belonging is raised to describe the individual’s affiliation to a particular locale (Hay, 1998; Pretty et al., 2003).

  The psychological concept consists of two key elements: membership and connection (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). First, the membership indicates a position in a locale where all in-group members can co-share the belonging consciousness. This membership represents a place-based identity, enabling one to discern in-group members and differentiate from out-group others by recognizing unique indigenous features (Hernández et al., 2007). Second, common connections with the location consolidate a sense of belonging. These connections incorporate similar life experiences, values, and cultures shared by community members. By producing personal and social memories, daily connections consistently endow a particular place with specific meanings (Eacott & Sonn, 2006). Place belonging develops across one’s lifecycle rather than remain unchanged. With the constant accumulation of shared experiences, residents are apt to strengthen their connection with the place and others within it. The process helps natives cement their group membership and shape a firm sense of belonging.

  In China, many scholars agree that rural adolescents commonly lose a sense of belonging. The failure to identify with local cultures and values is regarded as one primary factor arousing the individual’s underlying proneness to abandon the rustic membership and out-migrate (Cheng & Qin, 2019; Liao & Wong, 2020; Si, 2009). Nonetheless, existent research portrays a general panorama for the theme of rural residents’ place belonging, most of which tends to be theoretical and descriptive, failing to offer detailed explanations and relevant evidence with first-hand data. The insufficiency of empirical research renders corresponding arguments plausible yet virtually not credible enough. Besides, amid a limited number of empirical studies, more samples involve people exposed to urban life (e.g., university students and migrant workers). In contrast, adolescents remaining in local communities with more rural living incidents are apparently overlooked. Given current research gaps, this empirical study covers two research questions. First, how do rural junior high students elaborate on the status of their village-based belonging? Second, how do rural junior high students construct the place belonging to their place of origin?

  This study employs the concept of place belonging to reveal how Chinese junior high students with rural backgrounds cognize and interpret the relationship between themselves and their original dwellings, namely whether and how they feel that they belong to their rural hometowns. Research on rural adolescents is of great importance because they will grow into subsequent rural builders. Relevant findings on their place-based perceptions will facilitate further elaborations on why they choose to stay, leave, or return, thus benefiting the global explanation of rural developmental challenges. Noticeably, due to the word limits, this study seldom discusses the relationship between place belonging and migration intentions of rural students while taking it into future academic consideration.

This study primarily adopted an ethnographic approach that emphasizes an exploratory process. It lasted around ten months from September 2021 in the southeast of Guizhou, a province with lower per capita GDP in southwestern China. A township junior high (WY Middle School), located in a typically underdeveloped and rural region, was selected as the research base. There were 1,256 students during the school year from September 2021 to August 2022, most of whom were boarders and left-behind children. In total, by snowball sampling, 36 students were deeply involved in the study for interviewing and family visits, corresponding to 16 females and 20 males. There were 14 participants from Grade 8 and 22 participants from Grade 9. Given that interviewees may need to be more mature to think of and discuss the topic of place belonging, Grade 7 students were excluded from this study. The researcher utilized the personal network to access the school as a temporary teacher and collect data through observation, interviewing, and personal essays. First, by taking advantage of the position, the researcher built rapport with students and observed students' daily lives at school. Additionally, the researcher had been to 7 villages to visit 10 (out of 36) students’ families, thereby obtaining a more holistic understanding of their living surroundings and experiences at close range through multiple observations in the community and at home. Second, interviewing occurred in formal ways by adopting a semi-structured form concerning students’ hometown-related feelings and extracurricular lives, with questions such as “Do you feel that you are part of your village? Why do you feel like this?” “Could you introduce some interesting events in your community? What do you think of local events (e.g., activities, traditions, festivals, and customs)?” The recording was adopted with the interviewees' permission. Data was also supplemented by informal interviewing inside and outside the classroom, face-to-face or via social media applications. Third, the author required students to write short essays titled “The village in your heart.” This method is applied to learn rural students’ rural impressions, which serves the follow-up analysis of how they form such impressions and how these impressions relate to their place belonging. Upon the completion of data collection, the researcher processed the textual data from observation notes and interview transcripts by thematic analysis to generate concepts, identify patterns, and code into themes.

The research findings, overall, reveal that rural junior high students exhibit a relatively reliable sense of place belonging toward their villages. All the informants confirmed that they are part of their villages, or say, that they belong there. First, kinship and geo-relation are the underlying logic that generates the feeling of place belonging. In other words, the construction of belonging originates from the confirmation of kinship and geo-relation. When asked where they come from, students spoke out their village names as responses at once, which concerned specific locations where their families reside. Second, cultural symbols provide the motives to boost the development of place belonging. Despite intangible and abstract, unique cultures (e.g., languages, instruments, dances, costumes, and customs) generated from local areas constitute exclusive features to help residents identify with their place-based memberships and resonate with other in-group members. Third, tangible and concrete connections are the bonds that strengthen the sense of belonging. Long-term local interactions bring students place-related memories, facilitating the formation of entirety with cohesive force. However, rural students’ village-based belonging may not be as reliable as they voiced because of losing its developmental roots. First, most rural students’ cognition of local cultures is universally superficial. On the one hand, the environment where traditional cultures are inherited is not provided at school or in the community. On the other hand, adolescents have lost the corresponding passion in this regard. They know a little but just a little. Second, common connections fade due to the physical separation (boarding), increasing individual awareness, indulgence in the virtual world, and the local hollowing out caused by the population outflow. Therefore, rural students’ place belonging is becoming rootless and imperceptibly impaired. Its gradual loss may accelerate residents’ leaving and harm sustainable rural development, which deserves more academic consideration in the future.

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