Inequality in clean cooking adoption across urban and rural China

Urban and rural areas are following increasingly divergent trajectories in the transition to clean cooking energy, reshaping patterns of sustainability and social equity. Using nationally representative 1% census micro-sample data from 2010 and 2020, we estimate prefecture-level adoption rates for urban and rural populations and compare absolute and relative gaps. Our findings reveal that the urban transition has largely consolidated alongside sustained socioeconomic development, achieving near universal reliance on clean fuels, whereas the rural transition remains incomplete and uneven. Urban adoption rose from 71.0% to 94.2%, while rural adoption increased from 22.9% to 63.1%. The mean absolute gap declined from 48.1 to 31.1 percentage points, although disadvantages persisted in northern and western prefectures. Leakage-free XGBoost models evaluated by repeated nested cross-validation identified prefecture-level contextual associations. Population density and migration were consistently important model features, but predictive performance varied across outcomes. The findings support an integrated urban-rural strategy combining shared infrastructure, affordability protection and place-specific support for lagging transitions.