Rapid urbanization is widely regarded as a major pathway to rural development through improved market accessibility, infrastructure provision, and urban–rural functional linkages. Yet long-term empirical evidence has not sufficiently tested whether urban proximity enhances or erodes the resilience of rural territorial systems. Drawing on multisource remote sensing imagery, a harmonized nighttime light series, socioeconomic statistics, and key informant interviews spanning 1985–2025, this study reconstructs the spatiotemporal evolution of rural territorial system resilience in Quzhou County, a representative agricultural county on the North China Plain. An integrated element–structure–function framework conceptualizes rural resilience along three dimensions—element support capacity, structural resistance, and functional adaptability—extending the analytical focus from assessing system states to examining underlying mechanisms. The results show that the county-wide mean resilience index declined from 0.4832 to 0.2897, a cumulative decrease of 40%, with a 26.7% decline during 2015–2025 alone. The coefficient of variation across townships followed a nonlinear rise–fall–rise trajectory, indicating widening disparities, brief convergence, and renewed divergence, and reached a study-period maximum of 0.3859 in 2025. The combined area share of the low and relatively low resilience classes increased from 10.89% to 79.27%, whereas that of the high resilience class contracted from 17.50% to 7.82%, remained low, and ultimately fell to zero in 2025. Spatially, townships surrounding the county seat experienced the sharpest declines, contrary to the conventional expectation that proximity to urban centers strengthens rural resilience. Policy interventions yielded only temporary rebounds, and no township achieved systemic recovery during the study period. Instead, the system exhibited interconnected deterioration characterized by resource depletion, structural fragmentation, and functional homogenization. These findings motivate a “proximity paradox” hypothesis in urban–rural integration: when urban expansion erodes the resource base of surrounding rural areas, disrupts their spatial organization, and reduces their functional redundancy, geographical proximity to cities may shift from an enabling condition for resilience to a source of resilience loss. Accordingly, this study proposes a coordinated governance approach integrating the conservation of critical resources, the restructuring of settlements into a three-tier hierarchy, and spatial zoning into four functional categories. This approach provides an empirical basis for overcoming persistent rural decline and implementing differentiated spatial governance in agricultural plains undergoing rapid urbanization.
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Zhang et al. (2026) studied this question.