The National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has the purpose to support projects with the most practical value and advanced research in certain subject areas, which to a significant extent reflect the progress and the overall level of related studies. Based on the analysis of the funding situation of NSFC (in both natural sciences and social sciences), as well as political geographical research-related journal articles published by NSFC funding recipients, this study reached the following conclusions. First, political geographical research has been recently recognized by NSFC, in particular since 2011. The main research centers are located in Beijing, Guangzhou, Kunming, and Shanghai. Second, Chinese political geographical research has primarily focused on issues of borderlands and boundaries, environmental politics, territory (sovereignty and security), administrative division and governance, scale and space, and social and cultural politics. Finally, it can be concluded that Chinese political geographical research is increasingly connected to international political geographical research despite that Chinese political geography has its own feature, such as the studies on administrative division and governance. Alongside the increasing support from NSFC, we look forward to a disciplinary development of political geography with Chinese-characteristics by focusing on the international research frontier of political geography and demands within China.

There are rich political geographical arguments and practices in ancient China, which are of great significance to the development of contemporary Chinese political geography. However, neither political geographers nor historians had summarized the historical political geographical thoughts and their implications for the development of modern political geography in China. To help narrow this gap, the current article briefly reviews a large body of historical works and records from the pre-Qin period to the late Qing dynasty from the perspective of modern political geography. The contents are classified into three topics: territorial advantages (mainly including siting of capital and establishment of towns with important military functions), geographical administration (mainly including maintaining the central control over local places, and governing the land and the people), and geopolitical relations (mainly including securing the borderland and defeat the surrounding barbarous nations). The article summarizes the key points of each topic and discusses the similarity and difference between Chinese historical political geographical thoughts and related concepts and theories in Western political geography. We hope that future political geographical research will pay more attention to the traditional wisdom and thoughts in ancient China, as well as to supplement and refine the framework and findings proposed in this article.