Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Rural sustainability hinges on balancing ecological protection with economic development, yet how these objectives interact across space remains poorly quantified at fine administrative scales. Using county-level panel data for 1,943 Chinese counties (2012–2022), we constructed composite ecological and industrial revitalisation indices from satellite-derived products, measured their coupling coordination degree (CCD), and decomposed spatial spillovers into direct and indirect effects. National CCD rose modestly from 0.277 to 0.306, but 34.9% of western counties experienced industrial trade-offs. Spatial Durbin model decomposition revealed that industrial revitalisation generated significant cross-county spillovers (indirect effect = 0.074, P < 0.01), whereas ecological spillovers were negligible. A difference-in-differences design exploiting the 2017 rural revitalisation policy yielded a negative but causally limited estimate. Projections under Monte Carlo simulation (1,000 iterations) confirmed that coordinated development robustly outperforms single-objective pathways. These results demonstrate that rural sustainability requires spatially differentiated policy and provide a transferable diagnostic for developing countries.</p>