Abstract: As the rapid progress of industrialization and urbanization, China has been on the key phase of economic and social transformation and reconstruction between urban and rural areas, certainly bringing opportunities as well as shocks and challenges to rural areas. Recent multifunctional rural transition has been one of the most important theories to evaluate rural development, and has also been a hot research direction of rural geography in China. First, this paper systematically sorted out the viewpoints of the research connotations of multifunctional rural transition at home and abroad in the past 20 years, and then explored how to divide types of rural territorial multi-functions on village scale in China, and further constructed a multi-functionality evaluation index system and index analysis model. Second, using the well-developed Jintan city located in the south of Jiangsu province as a case, this paper evaluated and graded the territorial functions of ecology, agriculture, industry, living and comprehensive function. Last, the spatial differentiation characters of rural multi-functions have been revealed and the dominated functions of each spatial unit have been identified in Jintan city. Several conclusions were as follow:(1) Ecology-oriented functional areas were mainly distributed in the areas around the Changdang Lake, Zhixi town and western Xuebu town, where the densities of rivers and forests were relatively high; (2) The agriculture function indexes were high in the plain river network region located in both the middle and south of Jintan city; (3) Industry-oriented functional areas were mainly distributed in the Yaotang town and the surroundings of the central urban area, and all those belong to the industrial cluster districts according to the urban planning of Jintan;(4) Living function indexes were high in the surroundings of the city's build-up areas and whose spatial distribution characters were similar to that of rural industry functions; 5) The rural multifunction indexes were gradually weakened from city's core areas to the edges, and there had been a significant correlation between rural multi-functional development and urban-rural relationship; 6) According to the evaluation indexes mentioned above, six functional types had been identified in the 96 regional units, and they were comprehensive development type, ecology-dominated type, agriculture-dominated type, industry-dominated type, living-dominated type and balanced development type, and each one had significant characteristics of spatial concentration within the city of Jintan, and then several development strategies corresponding to those types had been proposed. In conclusion, this paper provided a scientific reference for identifying rural development orientation, accomplishing main-functional zone division, improving policy measures of rural management, and promoting rural sustainable development; meanwhile, it was a meaningful supplement for the quantitative research of rural multifunctional development on village scale in China.

Key words: village scale, multifunction, types division, evaluation, Jintan city