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  • Original Articles
    FAN Jie, SUNWei
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    The past five years is an important period for the development of human-economic geography in China. Led by the social demand of sound urbanization and regional sustainable development in China, human-economic geography has played a leading role in the important national regional planning and strategy consultation, a series of important research results have been adopted by the Central Government and had a favorable impact on the society. Human-economic geographers have made considerable progress in theory and methods construction. There have been great breakthroughs in the National Key Technology R&D Program and the key projects supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Social Science Foundation of China. the quantity and quality of papers and academic books, the scientific reward, the construction of Provincial and Ministerial Key Laboratories and Key Disciplines. In recent years, the development of human-economic geography in China presents the following characteristics: the orientation of interdisciplinary sciences and the value of applied basic research hace been further clarified, the combination of“human geography + economic geography” as the framework of human-economic geography has been formed, the application field based on the man-earth system research has been expanding, the new subject direction and fields geared to the social and cultural development have been strengthened, and the technology of GIS has received more and more attention. Compared with that of foreign countries, human-economic geography in China is lack of a humanization tendency. Although Chinese scholars are good at providing scientific proposals for government decision-makers, they have not reached the required levels of international communication, frontier academic thought and the systemic theoretical originality. In the years to come, the human-economic geography research in China should concentrate on and make breakthroughs in the interdisciplinary research, the theoretical foundation construction and disciplinary framework optimization, and the methods of data acquisition and spatial simulation.
  • Original Articles
    FANG Chuanglin, ZHOU Shangyi, CHAI Yanwei, LU Yuqi, ZHU Hong, FENG Jian, LIU Yungang
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    This paper focuses on the status quo, progress and future development prospects of human geography, particularly on its crucial and newly emerged subgroups including the theory of human-environment interactions, cultural geography, behavioral geography, social geography, and political geography. After comparing intensive literature review of both China and English-world scholars, we strongly believe that human geography in China has achieved fruitful results on its theoretical innovation, research methodology, technological innovation and practical application. Some conclusions can be drawn as follows. (1) By virtue of geographical thinking, the position and content of the theory of human-environment interactions has been greatly enhanced. (2) The scope of cultural geography has broadened, whose study direction is turning to New Cultural Geography. (3) Behavioral geography has aroused attention and generated many crucial results. (4) To meet the needs of geopolitical strategy, political geography resurges in the research and policy analysis circles. (5) Along with the construction of harmonious society, social geography is emerging as an important field. The general trends of Chinese human geography in future has to keep pace with Chinese social and economic development, be oriented to the national strategic needs, aimed at establishing a scientific development viewpoint with harmonious human-environment interactions, and solving new problems in national development with full strength. Meanwhile, it should deepen studies on the theory and research methods of human-environment interactions, strengthen the research on the regulation mechanism, process, pattern, rhythm, and the demonstration and application of the man-land system, and strengthen the research on systematical management and monitoring, dynamic simulation, and technique support system, and enhance the research on global problems, global change and its regional response in the evolution process of man-land system, and reinforce the research on human-oriented environmental ethics and ecological morality of man-land system. With the rapid development of the national cultural industry and the strategic requirement of cultural construction of a powerful country, we should strengthen the inter-disiciplinary research between cultural geography study and cultural industry promotion, and construct the subject system of cultural geography based on absorbing overseas advanced results. Meanwhile, the theoretical scope and depth of research on behavioral geography should be expanded, and the experimental study should be strengthened. Last but not the least, human geographers should pay attention to the research of New Geopolitics, urban political geography and local political geography, and promote the development of social geography based on the Sixth National Population Census Data. We did this research to promote a faster but sound and sustainable development of human geography in China.
  • Original Articles
    LIUWeidong, JIN Fengjun, ZHANGWenzhong, HE Canfei, LIU Zhigao
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    Economic geography, the study on the location, distribution and spatial organization of economic activities, is an important subfield of the discipline of geography, and has always been playing a significant role in understanding and solving the geographical and spatial issues of economic activities. Economic geography in China was affected not only by the country's economic and institutional conditions, but also by academic thoughts and research methods from Europe, America and the former Soviet Union. Its unique trajectory forms a distinct“practice-based”characteristic, and can be summarized as“promoting the discipline through fulfilling tasks”, namely, the primary target and driving force of the discipline development are to satisfy the strategic demand of the country. At the same time, the practice tasks promoted the theoretical development. Chinese economic geographers' work is widely recognized by governments at all levels and the whole society in the country. The development of China's economic geography in recent years has the following characteristics. (1) Spatial planning at different scales is an important part of the research in economic geography (planning-oriented); (2) An increasing importance has been attached to the cross-disciplinary approach to the issue of economic geography, and to the cooperative study with other disciplines, especially with natural sciences (comprehensive guide). (3) Regional development and regional differences have become major study fields of economic geography (regionalism). (4) New techniques and simulation tools including GIS-based simulation analysis and visualization are more widely used (the application of new techniques). (5) China’s economic geographers are going out of the country and actively serve in international academic organizations (going towards“international”).
    The traditional research fields of economic geography have been greatly strengthened, at the same time, some new fields emerged, some of which, such as function zoning, energy and carbon emissions, globalization and foreign trade, producer service industry, information technology and the internet, and rural area development and farmers geographic location research, have made great progress. Meanwhile, China's economic geography achieved significant progress in the areas of man-land system and regional sustainable development, new factors and new patterns of regional development, industrial cluster and industrial agglomeration, globalization, multinational corporations and foreign investment, transportation geography and spatial organization, the transformation of resource-based cities and old industrial bases, marine economic geography, and regional spatial planning approaches. Function zoning analysis is highly associated with the Major Function Oriented Zoning. Carbon emissions are a new and amazing topic which brings economic geography into a grand field of global environmental change. Globalization, finance and information technology are important emerging factors shaping China’s regional development. Economic geographers are playing a critical role in making major spatial planning. The main nation-scale territorial planning projects are Main Function Zoning, the revitalization planning for Northeast China, the development strategy of Western China, the planning for the rise of Central China, the planning for resource-exhausted cities, eco-regional development planning, and other key areas’planning, such as the Yangtze River Delta, Beijing, Tianjin, and Chengdu-Chongqing region. Based on practical research, China's economic geographers, mostly from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, provided the CPC Central Committee and State Council with a number of advisory reports and exerted a great influence on the national policy making. The new development contents, for example, the globalization of sciences, the economic (re)rise of China, and the emergence of social and environmental problems, offers huge opportunities to the development of China's economic geography. Although China's economic geography has made remarkable achievements in the past years, it is facing challenges. In addition, the academic contribution of China's economic geography to the international academic circle is relatively weak in terms of academic outputs. We suggest that China's economic geography in the coming decade needs to (1) continue to meet strategic demands of national development, and further construct economic geography with Chinese characteristics; (2) strengthen the discipline construction and improve the capacity for sustainable academic development, through constructing new cooperation platforms and personnel training, and creating an atmosphere of academic criticism; (3) strengthen the advantages of traditional research areas, explore new problems and new phenomena of economic geography, and actively participate in the discussion of major topics such as global change; (4) improve the ability to apply new techniques in simulating and visualizing economic activities, including GIS, geo-computation, spatial intelligence; (5) expand international academic exchanges through attending and hosting international conferences.
  • Original Articles
    YU Taofang, LU Lachang, LIU Yungang, SUN Bindong, WANG Mingfeng
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    Urban geography is a major branch of numan geography, and is also important for urban studies. In China, the progress of urban feography is closely related to the rapid urbanization process. Generally, urban geography in China has the following features during the past few years. Firstly, the major topics mainly focused on the research of urbanization, urban systems or urban agglomerations, which played important roles for the national development in the social and economic fields. During this period, urban geographers took active part in the strategic decisions for the governments and also for the construction of cities or city-regions. For this, quantitative methods are often adopted. At the same time, new forces or persons are united together worldwide, and new fields of study broadened from the current demands of the society to the long-term need of human beings. Compared with foreign countries, the discipline of urban geography in China has already had its systematic theory such as those associated to urbanization and urban system issues, and most importantly, they are highly practical. In the future, on the one hand, urban geographers in China should continue their theoretical and practical exploration under the long-run urbanization context; on the other hand, they should do more for the current need of urban development.
  • Original Articles
    LIU Yansui, LONG Hualou, ZHANG Xiaolin, QIAO Jiajun
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    This paper firstly reviews the brief development course of the disciplines of agricultural geography and rural development in China, then introduces the recent major achievements and their applications in economic development, finally demostrates the prospect on the new innovative research tasks and scientific proposals in the fields of agricultural geography and rural development to meet the needs of national strategies, based on comparison with related research progress abroad. Recent research progress includes research achievements, the applications of new technologies and methodologies, the establishment of basic research platforms, and talents fostering programmes. The summary of recent research achievements concerns five topics: (1) integrated research on agricultural and rural geography; (2) rural hollowing and the renovation of hollowed villages; (3) integrated research on building a new countryside; (4) regional agriculture and rural development; and (5) the systematization and internationalization of research achievements. With the implementation of the strategy on “building a new countryside,”relative research concerning new countryside construction and the renovation of hollowed villages has attracted the interest of a wide variety of researchers in China. Recent research results indicated that the evolutive process of rural hollowing can be identified into five stages, i.e., emergence, growth, flourishing, stability, and decline. Based on regional economic development level and its physiographic features, the types of rural hollowing can be categorized as urban fringe, plain agricultural region, hilly agricultural region, and agro-pastoral region. Especially, the plain agricultural region is the most typical one in rural hollowing, which shows the spatial evolution of rural hollowing as a“poached egg”pattern with a layered hollow core and solid shape. Furthermore, the driving forces behind rural hollowing are identified as the pull of cities and the push of rural areas. Currently, regional discrepancies, rural poverty, rural land-use issues and the present international environment are four major potential factors influencing the building of a new countryside in China. Accordingly, some researches have been carried out such as the implication of rural land-use change for building a new countryside, rural development types and their regional differentiation caused by industrialization and urbanization. In the future, there will be an obvious trend of regionalized and base-oriented agricultural production, and also an increasing trend of urbanization and industrialization in the rural development of China. Therefore, there is an urgent need for innovative researches on agricultural geography and rural development to provide strong support to the realization of the coordinated and balanced rural-urban development, and the balance between agricultural economy and social issues, and to appropriately deal with the conflict between rural development and environmental protection. Accordingly, the future of agricultural geography and rural development research may focus on the following themes: (1) the mechanism and the integrated renovation model of hollowing village; (2) differentiation and restructuring of rural territorial types; (3) multi-functionality of rural system during the transition period; (4) the new pattern of regional agricultural types; (5) the effect and value of rural elements transformation; (6) rural-urban relationship and spatio-territorial restructuring; (7) driving mechanism and competitiveness of rural development; (8) territorial model and institution innovation of building a new countryside; and (9) the long-term strategy and guaranteeing system of building a new countryside in China.
  • Original Articles
    BAO Jigang, YIN Shoubing, LIANG Zengxian, CHEN Ganghua, LI Peng
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    Abstract:Tourism Geography is a comprehensive sub-discipline that involves physical geography, economic geography and human geography. Most of the vibrantly participating tourism geographers in China have the academic backgrounds and training history of physical geography and economic geography. Tourism geography in China was born in the 1980s when both the discipline of geography as a whole and the tourism industry have witnessed huge developments and prosperity since then. After 30 years of development, tourism geography has nowadays become one of the fastest-growing, most vibrant and productive sub-disciplines in China’s geographical studies. On the one hand, in the pursuit of knowledge innovation and diffusion, 1) academic standards have been discussed substantially, issues related to research question have been emphasized, and the self-awareness of disciplinary development has been intensified, hence a number of achievements with Chinese characteristics have been made in the areas of community-based tourism (community participation and empowerment in tourism development, power structure in tourism community), event & event tourism (mega-events such as Olympic Games, World Expo, Asian Games and the Canton Fair; festivals such as Qingdao International Beer Festival and Wutaishan Buddhist Festival), heritage tourism (heritage management & governance, heritage tourism), urban tourism (tourism commercialization in historic towns, recreational business district, urban tourism growth mechanism and tourism-induced urbanization), tourist flow and time-space structure, and related methodological innovations; 2) with the rapid establishment of many tourism faculties and/or schools in universities, tourism geography has been given a broader platform on which greater progress can be made, for instance, there had been 852 tourism programs or departments offered in China's universities by the end of 2009, and tourism geography is one of the core courses in universities; 3) as the international communication and cooperation deepens, tourism geography in China is getting more and more internationally-oriented, for example, scholars and students in and from China have published more academic papers in leading tourism-related English journals than before, more and more students from China have completed their Ph.D in universities in the USA, UK, Canada, and Japan, and most of them are scholars and students with geographical background and training history. On the other hand, in the pursuit of knowledge application/social services, tourism geography has made great contributions to regional development, by 1) participating in regional tourism plans of provincial regions such as Hunan Province and key areas such as Suzhou, Zhangjiajie, Huangshan and Guilin; 2) preserving world heritage sites such as Danxiashan in Guangdong, Zhangjiajie in Hunan, Huangshan in Anhui, and Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan; 3) promoting the standardization and internationalization of the tourism industry, such as drafting the Standard for National Exemplary Ecotourism Area. In the future, tourism geography in China is supposed to continue not only to take advantage of integrating theories with practices to strengthen and sustain the discipline, but also to stress the importance of theoretical constructions and developments for the purpose of disciplinary survival by increasing the‘theory depth’and promoting international dialogues and cooperation between China and the world.
  • Original Articles
    WU Songdi, HOU Yongjian
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    The group of historical human geographers in China has obtained a lot of academic results in many fields, including the geography of historical politics, the geography of population, the geography of historical cities, the geography of historical economics, the geography of historical culture, the history of environment, historical regional geography and CHGIS.
  • Original Articles
    DU Debin, FENG Chunping
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    Based on a review on works of world regional geography accomplished in China during the past 10 years and an analysis of its current problem, the research orientation for further sustained development of the discipline is discussed in this paper. Accompanied by a rapid rise of China, the fields of world regional geography in China have expanded from pure geography research on regions and countries outside China to including the study of global economy and political geography in its quest to satisfy the need of the national development. The major concerns of world regional geography researchers in China in recent years include: (1) research on world geopolitics and geo-economy, e.g. geopolitics-related theories, changing tendencies of geopolitical situations in given places across the world and some hot spots and impacts that geopolitical situations of the powers and surrounding regions have on China; (2) geographical research on international investment and multinational corporations, focusing on theories and mechanism of outward investment, spatial distribution and location determination of foreign investments in China, and analyses of investing scales, modes and performance; (3) theoretical and empirical research on the development of cities and regions in the world, highlighting the researches on laws of formation and mechanism of megalopolis and urban agglomerations around the world and empirical research on major cities in some countries such as USA, Japan, UK and France. The theoretical and empirical research on foreign regions revolves around the theory and practice of“new regionalism”, new regional division of labor, regional interaction and sustainable regional development; (4) research on global resources and environmental protection and conservation, focusing on the exploitation, development and utilization of global natural resources. The most serious one is the issue of energy, which is the main subject of much related research. On the basis of the above points, the authors point out the problems emerging in the development of world regional geography as a discipline in China, such as ineffective research team, insufficient research funds and poor research abilities, as well as differences between China and other countries in this area. Finally, the paper comes to the conclusion that the golden age of world regional geography research in China has arrived, therefore, it is necessary to enhance special research on critical global issues such as geopolitics and geo-economy. Thus, it is imperative to follow through the world geography research plans, such as the comprehensive research on countries and regions closely related to China in the areas of the developing trends of world economy, politics, science and technology and strictly conform with the objectives to implementing the important strategies for national development.
  • Original Articles
    WANG Zheng, LI Guoping, MIAO Changhong, ZHOU Guohua, LIU Xiao
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    This report concludes the progress in urban and regional management science since 2005 in six aspects: 1) exploring deeply in the theory and mode of urban and rural co-ordination; 2) getting a better understanding of the regional segregation through regional coordinating administration; 3) putting forward the concept of networked metropolitan areas and the opinion of hub structure in regional structures and the field of geopolitics; 4) Making progress in governance research on high-tech industrial clusters and public services; 5) Having breakthroughs in innovative city theories associated with regional knowledge management. On the whole, compared with foreign research, our study has distinctive advantages and specific concentrations which should be developed in the aspects such as general theory of regional governance, organization dynamics of industrial clusters and low-carbon urban management. Our report points out that urban and regional management has made great advancement through several years of efforts and in the next five years our study in this area should obtain much more progress in methodology and application.
  • Original Articles
    HAN Zenglin, DI Qianbin
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    Regarding the ocean economic geography as the research platform and orientating it to promoting the sustainable development of ocean and sea islands, and coastal areas, human-economic geographers have conduct studies on the ocean and sea islands to explore the multi-disciplinary intersection and methods integration. Human-economic geographers have extensively participated in the compilation concerning the national, provincial and municipal mid- and long-term development planning and finished many national and local scientific research projects, and are playing a greater role in decision making in governmental departments at all levels. From the aspect of human-economic geographic issues on marine economic development, sea island development and coastal area economic development, arising from modernization of China, have undergone a period of effective theoretical and comprehensive application research in combinination of national strategic demand "upholding sea-land coordination strategy, and developing marine economy", which is playing a critical role in promoting the development of human-economic geography and regional economy of China. Based on the recent research achievements and progress on ocean and sea island development, this paper summarizes the major direction of research and problems and pridictes the trends and prospects of research.
  • Original Articles
    CHENWen, ZHANG Pingyu, ZHANG Xiaolei, DENG Wei, YANG Zhaoping, XUE Junfei, DU Hongru, LI Xuemei, LIU Ying
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    As the main regional types in China, urban concentrated areas, old industrial bases, borderland areas, and mountainous areas are important objects when human-economic geography scholars conduct research on the formation rule, driving force, evolving process and spatial distribution of“man-earth relationship regional system”. With the development of globalization, industrialization, urbanization and informatization, relationship between social economic system and natural system is changing distinctly. So getting a better understanding of the areas mentioned above is both the inherent requirement for promoting the development of human-economic geography and the necessary requirement for strengthening the service functions of human-economic geography in the national and regional development. This article focuses on the latest research progress of spatial pattern and its evolution of China's urban concentrated areas, revitalization of old industrial bases, dynamic factors and processes in urban agglomeration and diffusion, settlement space and resource environmental bearing capacity of mountainous areas. And then, we summarize the crucial role of human-economic geography in the national important regional planning and strategy consultation, and significant research achievements and social influence of the typical study on the sustainable development of urban concentrated areas, revitalization of the old industrial bases and resource environmental bearing capacity of mountainous areas. Finally, from the view of subject construction and technical methods, we propose several important propositions of future research, including the social and ecological effects of the development of urban concentrated areas, the regional revitalization policies and the effect assessment, evolution dynamic and development patterns of borderland regional system, the choice and mechanism of sustainable livelihood in mountainous areas.
  • Original Articles
    FAN Jie, LIU Weidong, JIN Fengjun, LIU Yansui, ZHANG Wenzhong, LIU Hui, WANG Chengjin, WANG Dai
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    The Chinese government launched a series of science and technology research programs to keep pace with the latest progress in world sciences research and solve the key problems emerging in China’s rapid development. Climate change, land surface processes, land use and natural disasters are the academic domains which human-economic geographers mostly devoted themselves to further research. Some important progress in the human- driven mechanism of land surface process and resource environment carrying capacity evaluation has offered a scientific basis for the government’s planning and environmental diplomacy. This paper reviews the major tasks undertaken by human-economic geographers and summarizes the major contributions and social impact of human-economic geography, such as the final consumption oriented research on carbon footprint, system dynamics of human geographical processes, key issues in land use decision making, and resource environment carrying capacity evaluation for disaster-hit areas.
  • Original Articles
    LI Fangyi, GAO Xiaolu, WANG Yingjie
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    Housing structure is a principal factor of seismic vulnerability in Chinese rural areas. Therefore, analyses on the economic, geographic and cultural factors underlying the spatial differentiation of housing structures are very important for assessing the vulnerability of different regions. In this paper, a database of rural housing structures of 2699 counties all over China was established based on the Fifth National Census in 2000, where housing structures were divided into three types by the materials of bearing structures, i.e., reinforced concrete, brick-mixed and traditional (including houses made up of wood, grass, bamboo or other materials that are not standard). Then, the spatial patterns of rural housing structures were examined at both regional and county scales. It was found that, brick-mixed structure was the most important housing structure type in rural China, and the proportion of traditional housing structure was very high in the western region (close to 50%). Further analysis revealed that the distributions of traditional and brick-mixed structure houses were significantly influenced by the climate, rural economy and culture. The increase of incomes of rural citizens would prompt the shift of rural houses construction from traditional houses to brick-mixed ones. The proportion of the reinforced concrete structure houses in rural areas was generally low, but higher in the eastern and central regions than in the western region. Factors affecting the distribution of reinforced concrete structure houses include the climate, non-agricultural employment and township economy. It is suggested that the primary purpose of rural policies should aim to increase farmers’income to lower the degree of the seismic vulnerability in rural areas. Besides that, promoting the concentration of population in towns instead of in rural areas and gradually disseminating and applying the anti-seismic standards of house-building are also needed.
  • Original Articles
    WANG Xianwen, XU Shenmeng
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    The recent years have witnessed a popularity of Internet and on-line shopping. With the improvement of the public’s awareness of shopping on line, and supported by the highly developed logistics and economic environment, the C2C e-commerce is developing rapidly in China. Based on the data of the online stores on the largest C2C e-commerce website, Taobao.com, by using methods of Quartile map, Cartogram map, Moran’s I index et al in GIS tools and spatial econometrics, this paper studies 354 prefecture-level cities and discusses the development of C2C Taobao online stores of China. The results show that the C2C e-commerce is highly relevant to the economic development of the city. And the well-developed economic environment and logistics industry have promoted the boom of C2C e-commerce. In addition, in China, there tends to be a decreasing geographical distribution from the eastern coastal areas to inland areas. The C2C e-commerce is active in eastern China, especially in the Yangtze River Delta with Shanghai and Hangzhou at the center and the Pearl River Delta with Guangzhou and Shenzhen at the center. And the on-line shopping has become a well-developed industry. On the contrary, in western China, the C2C e-commerce is still in a very backward state except in some capital cities. The spatial autocorrelation analysis on 354 cities shows that there is a significant and positive spatial autocorrelation in the development of C2C e-commerce of China. Even taking the per capita index into consideration, we believe the C2C e-commerce still has a fairly centralized distribution.
  • Original Articles
    ZHANG Yihong
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    German's romantic poet Holderlin and China's pastoral poet Tao Yuanming have both been known as the "poet of poets". Their poems all contain a deep "homeland" complex. The study of their respective masterpieces- Holderlin's "home" and Tao's "GuiQuLaiXi" reveals many intriguing findings. Although they differ in their cultural backgrounds and cultural contexts, and emotional tones, the longings and yearnings for a "poetic residence" they built up in their works actually reflect a common aesthetic realm of human life. From the aspects of the two poems, this paper discusses the two sets of the cultural and geographic characteristics and genes that shaped the two poets who are of different ages and come from different places as wel as the factors that are responsible for their unique poetic styles.