关键词: 地理学发展, 地球系统科学, 21世纪, 中国

Abstract:

Based upon the review of the developed achievements and the facing problems, this paper deals with the difficulties and challenges met by geographic sciences in modern China. Some aspects related to the geography development in the 21st century's China are discussed and probed. Within more than 50 years since the foundation of P. R. China, China's geography has been greatly achieved in the fields of theoretical and application research, the utilization of technology, subject construction and education, basic research abilities and international cooperation. Accompanied with the development of China's geography, it is also meeting the unprecedented challenges due to the changing natural-social-economic environments, such as the rapid growing of global change sciences, the appearance and deepening of plenty of inter-sciences and branch sciences, the geographical specialty adjustment driven by market economic. At the same time, these challenges also give a great of opportunities for China's geographical development. By the analyses, the authors suggest that the present and future development and financial devotion should be put on these key aspects, such as regional studies and sustainable development, the inter-actions among the factors of earth surface system, man-land relations and the terrain system, regional response and adaptation under global changes, Syntheses of multi-disciplines, new techniques utilization and quantitation, in-situ observation and scale conversion, specialty adjusting and education reforming, research abilities etc. These efforts will greatly promote the China's geography development and realize the jumping from a big country to a powerful country on geographical sciences in China.

Key words: Development of geographical sciences, Earth system sciences, 21st century, China