Regional resilience has become a trendy research branch. However, traditional Chinese research of resilience had been limited within the equilibrium-based epistemology. This article, based on a review of international literature, clarifies different definitions of economic resilience: engineering resilience, ecological resilience, and evolutionary resilience. The article rejects equilibrium-based epistemology of resilience and argues instead the evolutionary perspective. Then, it introduces the formation mechanism of economic resilience from macro and micro aspects; and introduces quantitative measurement of network analysis. This article concludes that resilience should be extended to the economic field and evolutionary-based perspective. Chinese researchers should notice connections between three research branches — namely evolutionary economic geography, innovation geography, and regional resilience. Future research should focus on case studies of urban and regional economies. They should also explore the existing open patent data source to establish the quantitative database of industry space.

Cross-border and domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have undergone a rapid growth in recent years, which has facilitated the mobility of various elements across different regions and sectors. Therefore M&As are considered an important impetus and solution for the optimization of enterprise organization, industrial transformation, and spatial restructuring, as well as regional integration and sustainable development. Since the 1950s, there has been a vast literature straddling the boundaries of economics, enterprise managerialics, international trade studies, and economic geography on M&As. The literature mainly focused on three perspectives, namely organizational perception, interaction or networks perspective, and a contextual or spatial view of the firms involved in M&As. Taking advantage of theories and methodologies in relevant research fields, such as location theory, corporate geography, industrial agglomeration, and global production networks and proximity, scholars have done much effective empirical work on this issue. First, the spatiotemporal pattern and contacting networks of M&As have been investigated in various spatial scales, such as worldwide, inter-countries, and inter- and intra-regions. Second, deriving related theories, the literature focused on the driving factors and dynamic mechanism of M&As, especially the heterogeneities of enterprise characteristics, industrial attributes, and locational context. Third, the literature has paid increasing attention to the locational implications of M&As for corporate performance, public welfare, industrial transformation, and regional development, and the spatial consequences of M&As is a hotspot for related studies. Although cross-border and domestic M&As taken by Chinese corporates are increasingly frequent since the global financial crisis, research on M&As from spatial and geographical perspectives in China is far from sufficient. Therefore, this literature review focuses on the progress in theoretical perspectives and empirical research on M&As, and explores the implications and agendas for further research on M&As in a transitional China.

Paleoflood reconstruction is one of the foci of global change research and in the last decades, increasingly more attention has been paid to investigate lacustrine sediments to identify sedimentary proxies (such as chemical, physical) and extract environmental information of flood events. This article attempts to elucidate the issue based on recent Huangmaotan lacustrine sediments and reconstructs the regional paleoflood records of northern Jiangxi since the Little Ice Age. This investigation, using the 137Cs and 210Pb-based chronology, first presents a comparative analysis of grain size parameters, geochemical indices of sediments, and annual number of days with rainfall >50 mm during the last 60 years. It indicates that the particle size parameters, including (coarse silt+sand)/clay ratios, mean grain size (um), and ratios of Zr/Rb, Zr/Fe, and Ti/Rb correlated well with 11 of the 13 flood events recorded in historical documents during 1950-2010, which suggests that these indices can be applied to identify flood events from lacustrine sediments. Based on these indices, 23 of the 31 flood events during 1769-1950 recorded in historical documents are identified. The study indicates that: (1) Zr/Rb, Zr/Fe, and Ti/Rb ratios, (coarse silt + sand)/clay ratio, and mean grain size are sensitive to flood-event deposits, especially Zr/Rb ratios. Strong catchment erosion during flooding periods and intensified river discharge, we argue, are favorable conditions for the delivery of more coarse particles to the lake to deposit. This type of horizons, with high Zr and Ti, and low Fe and Rb, contrast with background lacustrine sediments. (2) This study also demonstrates that there were more floods occurred during the recent warm period (1900-2010) compared with the last cold stage of the Little Ice Age (1800-1900). (3) On multi-decadal time scales, regional floods were high-frequency incidence in the 1820s-1840s and the 1860s-1870s, when the East-Asian summer monsoon was stronger and rainfall was above normal in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River catchment, and in two warm phases (the 1920s-1940s and the 1980s-1990s), consistent with the characteristics of heavy floods in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River during the 20th century. The study provides a scientific basis for reconstructing paleoflood change by lacustrine sediments, and extends the time series of flood events by lake sediments.

With accelerating urbanization, population growth, and urban expansion, modern urban stormwater management faces new challenges. Based on the scenario analysis method, this study analyzed the cost-effectiveness of China's urban low impact development (LID) technical facilities. We calculated the benefits of different facilities under 80% and 95% rainfall event control rate scenarios respectively in the 30-year service period. The results show that the cost of construction and maintenance in the northern cities are higher than those in the southern cities. Benefits of stormwater management in the southern cities are generally higher than those in the northern cities. In addition, within the northern cities, benefits of urban stormwater management are lower in Beijing, Tianjin, and northwest regions. For different facilities, the cost of stormwater management for in situ infiltration is between 6 and 188 yuan/m3, significantly higher than the technical facilities with confluence function. Due to their low cost and reasonable effectiveness, combined sunken green area and rainwater wetland are suggested for northern cities with low precipitation. In the southern cities with more rainfall and strong rainfall intensity, it is recommended to use biological retention facilities in combination with regulating ponds. These methods not only can increase the storage capacity to meet the requirements of rainfall control rate but also can increase the rainwater infiltration and help purifying rainwater on the ground.

With the development of tourism, host-guest relationship at tourism destinations is increasingly diverse and complex. Existing studies on host-guest relationship have paid much attention on local residents. But few studies have explored the mutual influencing mechanism among tourist motivation, contact intention, and tourists' experience quality, especially from the perspective of tourists. This study employed an on-site survey in Mount Sanqingshan National Park to build the tourist perspective motivation-contact intention-experience quality (MCE) model. We also applied the invariance measurement with the multi-group structural equation model. The result shows that tourist motivations at the sightseeing destination can be classified into four categories: experiencing life motivation, excitement/adventure motivation, relaxation/escape motivation, and socializing/knowledge motivation. Tourists' contact intention can be divided into two dimensions: moderate contact intention and close contact intention. The modeling result indicates that tourist motivations of experiencing life, relaxation/escape and socializing/knowledge have direct effect on moderate contact intention, and tourist motivations of excitement/adventure, relaxation/escape, and socializing/knowledge have direct effect on close contact intention. Close contact intention has a greater influence on tourists' experience quality than moderate contact intention. We also divided the samples into gender groups for invariance measurement with the multi-group structural equation model. We found that the model built in this study showed stability across samples.

Reducing social vulnerability to floods is an important way to alleviate the social impact of flood disasters and to improve flood resilience. This article constructs an evaluation index system for social vulnerability to floods with regard to sensitivity, adaptability, and exposure based on a micro-scale analysis. Taking four riverside villages in Ankang City as an example, we adopted the integrated index weighted by entropy method to evaluate rural households' social vulnerability to floods. Then we clarify the importance of the relationship between evaluation index and social vulnerability by BP neural network method, and identify the major influencing factors of flood vulnerability. Accordingly, countermeasures and suggestions are put forward as a practical basis for reducing the rural households' social vulnerability to floods. The main results of this research are as follows. (1) Half of the households (715) in the case study villages showed a high level of social vulnerability. (2) The difference in social vulnerability is mainly a result of eight factors, including health status of the respondents, information channel on flood prevention, evacuation method, building quality, sick or disabled person in a household, household income diversification, proportion of children under the age of 5, and proportion of older people over 60 years of age. (3) Social vulnerability evaluation based on the perspective of rural households can accurately identify vulnerable farmers and analyze the influencing factors, which have more realistic significance for reducing the social vulnerability to floods of rural households.

With the rapid development of urban economy and the promotion of urbanization, great changes have taken place in the spatial pattern of population migration in China. Migration has played an important role in the economic, social, and cultural development of cities. Based on the provincial population migration matrix data of 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in 1985-2015, a social network analysis was conducted to investigate the overall characteristics of interprovincial population migration network and the role of each node. The results show that: (1) Network density of interprovincial population migration has experienced a slow decline in 1985-2000 and a continuous increase in 2000-2015. The concentrated migration of population from the northwest, southwest, and central regions to the eastern developed areas has become the mainstream of development. (2) The inward center potential of population migration network rapidly increased in 1985-2005 and gradually declined in 2005-2015. It indicates that the number of important population moving areas were increasing gradually (such as Tianjin and Fujian), towards a "multi-polarization" development. The outward center potential was always at a low level and exhibited a trend of fluctuation. The inward center potential was clearly larger than the outward center potential. It indicates that the population migration area is relatively concentrated, and the population emigration area is relatively dispersed. (3) The interprovincial population migration network can be divided into 5 groups: Northeast-North China population linkage area, Central Plains-Yangtze River Delta population linkage area, Middle South-Pearl River Delta population linkage area, southwest population linkage area, and northwest population linkage area. Among them, the Central Plains-Yangtze River Delta population linkage area was the most closely linked between and within group; Middle South-Pearl River Delta population linkage area had the highest total population migration. The Northeast-North China population linkage area had a stronger internal connection and only strongly linked with the northwest region externally. (4) According to the population migration analysis, the 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities can be divided into three major categories: net population migration areas including eight provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities (Guangdong, Zhejiang, Beijing, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Tianjin, Fujian, and Xinjiang); population balanced areas including six provinces and autonomous regions (Hainan, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Liaoning), and population net emigration areas including 17 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities including Sichuan, Henan, and so on. (5) Based on the centrality analysis and the core-periphery structure, contributions of the provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities to population migration was very different. In the interprovincial population migration network, a few core nodes had strong control over the total amount and path of population migration. About 25-30% core provinces controlled 70-80% of the population migration and path of the country, and the control power continued to rise. Among these provinces, Guangdong and Beijing had overall control significance. Jiangsu, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Zhejiang were largely among the core control nodes. The role of Shanghai, Tianjin, Inner Mongolia, and Fujian as core areas had gradually increased. The role of Henan, Hubei, Hebei, and Xinjiang as core areas had declined. The overall migration path of the country is northward.

With the main focus of regional competition shifting from cities to urban agglomerations, it is important to analyze the spatial structure and direction of coordinated development in urban agglomerations. This is especially significant in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration, which is a core urban agglomeration in China. Machine learning algorithms are relatively new methods for addressing geographical problems. Clustering method, as unsupervised learning, is useful for classifying geographical units without the need for priori knowledge. Using data from 156 counties in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration, this study applied four clustering algorithms: the K-means, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), Chameleon, and self-organizing map (SOM) methods, for classifying counties and districts in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration from the perspectives of economic centrality, traffic centrality, information centrality, and population centrality. GDP of the counties in 2014 was used to represent economic centrality; density of road networks in counties and attraction factor, calculated by the unsold train tickets in different time periods of the year, represent traffic centrality; Sina Weibo check-in data were used to represent information centrality; and county/district population represents population centrality. The result classifies the urban agglomeration into several levels. Respectively, K-means algorithm classifies counties into five levels; DBSCAN algorithm classifies counties into six levels; Chameleon algorithm classifies counties into six levels; and SOM algorithm classifies counties into five levels. SOM is the most applicable algorithm for the division of the urban agglomeration because the structure of counties is stable. This study further analyzed the spatial structure of the urban agglomeration with the central place theory, which points out that an agglomeration should contain certain number of counties in every level. The result of the SOM algorithm matches the central place theory. This research shows that there were remarkable gaps between different levels of the urban agglomeration. The central area of Beijing, as the core of the region, has strong radiation effect on the surrounding areas, but its functions are shared by the nearby counties. Moreover, the second and third level central cities distribute evenly and play an important role in regional development.

Urban road structure is one of the most important factors influencing commercial agglomeration. Research on the relationship between urban road structure and commercial agglomeration plays a supporting role for the layout of services and traffic planning. Based on theories of space syntax combined with GIS and bivariate correlation analysis, we explored the correlation between road structure and commercial agglomeration in the Wuhan metropolitan area. The space syntax model was used to compute road structure indicators. The kernel density estimation method was used to calculate the density of commercial points of interests (C-POI) in 2014 to analyze the spatial structure of commercial agglomeration. We used the Pearson correlation coefficient to analyze the correlation between road structure and commercial agglomeration. The results show that: (1) Global integration showed the highest correlation with the commercial agglomeration among the four spatial syntactic variables. Finance and insurance services had the highest correlation with road structure. (2) Connectivity value and global integration value were significantly and positively correlated with C-POI density, with a spatial correlation pattern of "high-high" agglomeration. Total depth value showed a significant and negative correlation with C-POI density, with a spatial correlation pattern of "high-low" agglomeration. C-POI density increased first and then decreased with increasing control values. (3) The spatial distribution of commercial agglomeration presented a "multicore-transitional area-periphery" multiple level structure. "High-high" agglomeration and "high-low" agglomeration were concentrated in the "core area" and the "transitional area" in the vicinity of the cores.

Unimpeded trade is one of the priorities of cooperation in the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China. On 15 May 2017, the Joint Communique of the Leaders Roundtable of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation reaffirmed the participants' shared commitment to build an open economy and ensure free and inclusive trade. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is not only China's new action to drive its open and global development, but also a platform for increasingly more countries to explore free and inclusive trade. It is therefore important to examine the topological relationship between BRI trade network and global trade network, for promoting a universal, rule-based, open, nondiscriminatory, and equitable multilateral trading system. Based on a literature review, this article first analyzes community structure and trade network based on community detection algorithm, and then estimates the topological relationship of different trade communities. The findings of this article are as follows. First, we identified five trade communities in global trade network through community detection algorithm, in which China, USA, Russia, India-UAE, and Germany-the Netherlands-France-Britain and other European developed countries are the cores of the five trade communities, respectively. Second, we identified three trade communities and two sub-communities in the BRI trade network, in which China is the core, Russia is the sub-core of the biggest trade community, and India, UAE, and Saudi Arabia are cores of the second trade community (South Asia-West Asia). Third, the topological analysis results indicate that in the global trade network, most BRI countries are attracted by the core nodes in the BRI area, such as China, Russia, India-UAE core nodes, and have strong trade contact with BRI countries. Most Central-East European countries are mainly attracted by Germany-the Netherlands-France-Britain and other European developed countries with low penetration of BRI trade. Although some Southeast Asian countries are incorporated into the Asia-Australia-South Africa community with China as the core, they still need to strengthen trade linkages with BRI countries.

Since the initiative of the Belt and Road strategy, the Chinese government greatly encourages the operation of China Railway Express (CR express), aiming to transform China's traditional international trading transport system. The growth of CR express helps to strength the transport role of the New Eurasian Land Bridge and promotes change of China's transport system for international trading from single maritime transport to a combination of maritime and land transport. The largest barrier for developing CR express, however, is that the freight sources are dispersed and the transport organization is nonstandard. This has led to the disorderly competition for international container transport due to the very recent growth of transport volume, which is brought by subsidies of local governments. This study examined the development history and problems in the last five years since the operation of the first CR express, and pointed out that the Chinese government must understand that the CR express cannot compete with the maritime transport for freight going from China to the EU market. The CR express has its economic transport hinterlands from the border ports and it is necessary to establish a hub-and-spoke transport mode at the national level and build the transport hubs for profiting from the operation of CR express. A model was built to define the economical transport hinterlands of the three border ports in China-Alashankou, Erenhot, and Manzhouli. The result indicates that Northeast China is the hinterlands of Alashankou and Northwest China is the hinterlands of Manzhouli. Other hinterland areas are defined by the traffic rate abroad from Erenhot. Finally, the article identifies the transport hubs for CR express including Chongqing, Urumqi, Harbin, Zhengzhou, among others, and puts forward suggestions and police recommendations to the Chinese government.

There is an increasing international consensus that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affords a platform for increasingly more countries to explore new international economic governance mechanisms and new development paths. In the meantime, neoliberal globalization has arrived at a crossroads, while anti-globalization voices are louder and practices more frequent since the 2008 global financial crisis, challenging the future of globalization at the scale of the world as a whole. Against this background, political elites and scholars increasingly see the BRI as a possible alternative and new globalization path and, in particular, as a path towards inclusive globalization. Based on a brief review of the process and mechanisms of global economic expansion, and a critique of neoliberal globalization, this article tries to use the vision and actions proposed by the BRI to develop the concept of inclusive globalization. The article suggests that inclusive globalization involves at least the following dimensions: a better and more powerful role of state as a mediator to ensure social justice and stability; correcting the duration mismatch in financial markets and provision of more patient capital to finance infrastructure development, productive activities, and real services in economically less-developed countries and regions; encouraging countries to choose and experiment with development paths that best fit their national conditions and values; enabling all stakeholders to participate equally in globalization; and protecting cultural diversity while promoting economic globalization. Although these dimensions are not sufficient to delineate in detail inclusive globalization, they at least point to several directions for future research on the topic and may offer some support for discursive construction of the BRI.

In China, the rise of housing prices has become one of the most pressing issues that residents encountered in recent years and received considerable attention. Regulating housing prices and preventing them from overheating have become an urgent question in some regions. This study examined the impact of public service provision on the spatiotemporal patterns of housing prices and its explanatory power in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province. A dataset of Chengdu housing prices and selected public service factors were constructed for the year 2016, and geographical detector technique was adopted in this study. The results indicate that the average housing price was 8480 yuan/m² in Chengdu in 2016, and it showed a progressive decrease from the city center to the suburbs between the traffic circles and along the radial arteries, forming the circular and radial patterns. In general, housing prices were high in the western and southern parts while low in the eastern and north parts of the city. The impact of public service provision (mainly health care, financing, and education services) on housing prices was most pronounced in the third circular zone and southwest of the downtown area, where it was higher than the overall impact in Chengdu downtown areas. The impact of public services on housing prices was significantly affected by the difference of spatial functions in different zones. Differences in public service provision and spatial functions will further deepen the differentiation pattern of housing prices, and promote the overheating of local property prices. We argue that a better understanding of the influence of public services on housing prices will help Chinese policymakers not only to formulate traditional financial and economic policies, but also to optimize spatial functions and public services.

Regions show different economic resilience after the 2008 financial crisis. However, there is no agreement on what factors impact regional economic resilience. In this study, we took Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces as an example and established a binary logistic regression model to analyze the influencing factors of regional economic resilience. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, we found that: (1) Regions with a higher level of innovation and a higher extent of unrelated variety and a larger proportion of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) tended to have better resilience in the economic crisis. (2) Regions with a large amount of financial expenditure and a stronger dependence on international trade showed a relatively weak ability to resist crisis. (3) Related variety had limited influences on regional economic resilience. This study points out that the impact of fiscal expenditure on economic resilience and regional development cannot be generalized. We should give full considerations to the structure of fiscal expenditure. Moreover, it is necessary to pay more attention to regional environment and institutions to fully understand the positive influence of the proportion of SMEs on regional economic resilience. Local governments should encourage innovation and increase investment in research and development, develop a diversified industrial structure, provide more support to SMEs, and optimize fiscal expenditure structure.

In evolutionary economics, the notion of path creation has attracted much attention in recent years. Previous research has expounded the possibility of path dependence and path creation in the process of regional industrial evolution, but it remains unknown that who changes the existing production capacity and accomplishes path creation. This article focuses on regional production capacity, and applies the indicator of density defined by Hidalgo. Based on the data of 424 four-digit industry of 337 prefecture-level cities in China from 1999 to 2012, this article discusses the path creation of China's industrial evolution. It is found that the entry and exit of an industry would break the original production structure of a region and become the creator of a new path. Governmental subsidies, on the one hand, can promote the development of a region's existing production capacity to enhance the regional's path dependence trend, but also can influence industry dynamics and accelerate the process of path creation. The selection of evolutionary path has significant regional differences. This study will help deepen the understanding of the change of China's industrial structure and its regional differentiation, and provides new evidence from developing countries for the development of evolutionary economic geography.

Service quality of seismic emergency shelters is an important reference of seismic planning. Spatial coverage of seismic shelters has been used for evaluating service quality of seismic emergency shelters. However, population distribution and evacuation behaviors were rarely considered, which rendered the evaluation results inaccurate. Based on a multi-agent simulation model, this study examined earthquake evacuation behaviors, such as choice of destination, routing, and sheltering. Evacuation rate—the rate of evacuees who successfully arrived at seismic shelters to take refuge within a specific time period—was then calculated. Coverage rate of emergency shelters and evacuation rate of residents both were used to indicate the evacuation success rate. A case study was conducted in Haidian district. The evaluation result shows significant difference between the spatial coverage rate of seismic shelters and evacuation rate. It indicates that coverage of emergency shelters alone cannot fully evaluate emergency shelters. Coverage rate of seismic shelters together with use efficiency of emergency shelters and signs for evacuation routes that lead to quick and order evacuation are all crucial indicators for evaluating service quality of seismic shelters.

China is one of the most active areas of the world's population mobility. The social structure of China during the socioeconomic transition period, the country's development phase, and its unique cultural background together form the Spring Festival travel rush, a social behavioral phenomenon with a significant regularity and a high degree of uniformity and unity. By constructing the 2015 Spring Festival interprovincial population flow relation matrix, we examined the dynamics of population flow and its spatial characteristics. The results are as follows: (1) 13-17 February and 25 February-1 March were the peak population flow periods before and after the holiday season. Inflow and outflow of population between provinces during these time periods can be indicative of interprovincial migration of floating population in China. We identified 14 net population inflow provinces and 17 net population outflow provinces. The top six and bottom eight population inflow provinces in the eastern and central regions form the double vertical pattern of immigration and emigration of floating population in China. (2) Provincial population outflow primary directions are clear and flow from the central to the eastern coastal areas is the main direction and path of migration of the floating population. Guangdong and Beijing are the primary migration destinations of the floating population in southern and northern china. These two province/municipality monopolized 2/3 of the interprovincial population flow of the country. (3) The source areas of the floating population in the Beijing and Tianjin area, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta—the three major population agglomeration areas—are significantly different. Those in the Beijing and Tianjin area and the Pearl River Delta are mainly directly from the floating population emigration provinces, but the Yangtze River Delta has formed a more advanced network structure. (4) Mobility-based study on the temporal and spatial characteristics of China's population flow contains a wealth of information on floating population migration, and the Spring Festival travel rush provides an opportunity for such study. By comparing the result with previous research results, similarity between the new data and many conclusions based on the census data is clear.

Migrant workers' migration at the micro level is associated with intercity economic linkages at the macro level. Jointly considering attributes of migrant workers and source/destination cities and network relation structures provides a powerful tool for the analysis of such association. Using the survey data of 1142 migrant workers and network data of 198 cities from official websites, this article analyzes the effects of individual and city attributes, individual social network factors, and city network factors on migrant workers' migration. Regression results indicate that individual attributes such as age, education, occupation type, working years, emigration and immigration areas, and individual network factors such as the type of helpers in job seeking and whether the helpers hold a public service position, have significant impact on migrant workers' choice of destination area, migration distance, and income. Through analyzing city attributes and whole networks' out-degree and in-degree, correlation between networks, scale-free properties, core-periphery structure, and small world characteristics, the following migration patterns are revealed: from underdeveloped areas to developed cities, pursuing high wages at the expense of long distance, clustering in target cities, no guarantee of high salary working in developed cities, and migrating to developed cities directly rather than through indirectly routes. Based on the above conclusions, some countermeasures and suggestions are proposed for guiding migration decision making, reducing information cost, and optimizing the allocation of labor resources.

As a general term that describes the accumulation of organic matters within specific temporal and spatial scopes on crop land, woodland, grassland, or other types of lands, land net primary productivity (NPP) is considered an important parameter to measure carbon cycle, guide land use, assess ecological security, reflect environmental changes, and indicate the level of food security. The estimation precision of NPP is significantly influenced by the type of models and input of key surface parameters of ecosystems. In recent years, with the continuous growth of remote sensing data and the rapid development of remote sensing data processing technologies, NPP estimation models based on remote sensing data, as compared to NPP estimation using traditional observation data such as climate and soil data with coarse spatiotemporal resolutions, have become very prominent in analyzing temporal and spatial heterogeneity. Based on the Web of Science and CNKI databases and statistical analysis methods, this study systematically reviewed research on NPP and its estimation models integrating remote sensing data in China and internationally. The commonly used models can be divided into four categories: statistical models, light use efficiency models, process models, and coupling models. We examined the mechanisms, differences, suitability, and limitation of the various kinds of models, Based on an analysis of the difficulties and scientific challenges that face integrating remote sensing data into NPP estimation models, research prospects are put forward with regard to model mechanism, influencing factors, data provision, parameter derivation, expansion of spatiotemporal scales, and hardware and software supports.

As China enters a new stage of rural transformation, rural production space is changing from household-based fragmented land management to moderate-scale land management of various forms. New conflicts due to the spatial competition of multiple stakeholders in the rural area and disordered spatial allocation of rural production resources have arisen. By introducing system theory thinking into the study of rural production space, this research puts forward the concept of rural production space system. Inspired by a series of theories and concepts, including the space concept in geography, behavior space and spatial behavior, the theory of "production of space," and the thoughts of regional system of human-land relation, this study traced the theoretical origin of rural production space system and proposed its core connotation. Following the logic of conceptual development to operation and regulation, this study proposed four basic problem domains of rural production space system, including its theoretical analysis, mechanism of change, mechanism of formation, and optimization and regulation. After briefly outlining a research framework of rural production space system, this article prospects three important objects of future research. We need to understand the essential factors that rural production space system consists of, as well as the definition of their relationships; focus on the mechanism of interactions between "human" and "land"; and pay close attention to the behavioral aspect of human-land relationship. Also, we should explore the use of new approaches that are multidisciplinary and integrate multiple methods. On these bases, this study aimed at providing a theoretical basis for the research of sustainable development of rural production space, expanding from basic research to practical applications.