The rise of integrated physical geography in China is not an accidental event. It was closely connected with the construction of the related theory system, the fostering of domestic professional scholars, the inheritance of academic history both at home and abroad, and the demand of social development in China. Specifically speaking, it was influenced by the spread of Western modern geography in the early 20th century, and the traditional harmony theory of Chinese ancient geography; it was also associated with the geographical intensive Sino-Soviet academic communications in the 1950s, as well as the needs of economic development in China. All in all, as a branch of physical geography, the integrated physical geography is a practice-oriented subject, focusing on comprehensive perspectives of natural regionalization, land change, and landscape service. The main contents of integrated physical geography studies in China have developed from agricultural regionalization and ecological regionalization to integrated regionalization; from land type, land source to land system; from landscape pattern research to landscape function and service research. Along with the change of the study theme, this subject kept on improving and deepening. Faced with the growing challenges such as rapid urban expansion, serious environmental pollution, and the natural resource exhaustion, the integrated physical geography in China is trying to explore new integrated approaches in accordance with the transformation of the time background. It chooses coupled human and natural systems as its study object, considers the synthesis of processes interaction at different regional scales, makes landscape sustainability as its key research field, and uses big data and high technology as its methodology.
Because of the huge impact of globalization and urbanization, cultural landscapes in urban and rural areas of China are faced with the challenge of being fragmenting, transforming, or even disappearing. To be a strong nation, China should not only focus on economic growth, but also on cultural inheritance and innovation. Based on the traditional cultural landscape preservation of individual, block and town scales, we try to make a break-through in terms of regional and transregional preservation, so that the integral and regional preservation ideas can be improved. Aiming at the generalized concept of cultural landscape, this research summarizes its adaptability, predictability and connectivity attributes, constructs the "node-setting-connection" model of the cultural landscape security pattern, and brings forward the elemental continuity, environmental broadness and network complexity features of the security pattern. The goal is to use the integral and regional ideas to protect the cultural connection of cultural landscapes, as well as to inherit the spiritual and cultural connotations.
The goal of building a beautiful country was proposed in the 18th CPC National Congress Report, and beautiful rural construction is an important step to realize the goal. Rural construction is a huge and structure-complicated system for the quantity of its villages and towns, population and industry economics. If there are no comprehensive thinking and systematic approaches, it is hard to realize the objective of building beautiful countryside. With the help of documents collected, typological methodology, systematic theory and previous practical experience in building beautiful countryside, the authors analyze and summarize the fruits and facts from aspects of system elements, structure and function. It is pointed out that the current system of rural construction is clear. However, there are some problems in subsystems which should be paid attention to, such as relying on external assistance to regroup construction elements, short-term and stage-phased governance structure, superficial and subjective function implementation. After summarizing and studying the current theory and practice, we believe that there is an urgent need to set up a sustainable and large-scale rural area construction-related theoretical system from perspectives of disciplinary development, academic research, policy mechanism and practice evaluation.
Since the earth entered into a new era of the Anthropocene Era, the human-environment relationship has become extremely complicated. As the important driving factor of the human-environment relationship, livelihoods provides the new perspective and the new tool for understanding the human-environment relationship. For now, geography has become one of the most active discipline researching sustainable livelihoods. Based on the overviewing the origin and framework of sustainable livelihoods research, we tease out the research status of the major topics in geography, which include the spatial heterogeneity of livelihoods, the relationship between livelihoods and eco-environment, the impact of vulnerability context/consequence and process transformation (such as climate change, land use / cover change, payment for ecological service and rural tourism) on the farmers' livelihoods, and livelihoods vulnerability assessment. Then, we point out that the relevant research in geography has paid less attention to the dynamics of livelihoods, the impact of globalization on livelihoods and the impact of multi-stressor on livelihoods, and in the meantime, short of comprehensive integration of the new techniques and methods. Finally, we present the prospects of future studies for sustainable livelihoods in geography which include the livelihoods' patterns-processes-mechanism, the trans-scale question of livelihoods, the ecological-economic-social effect of livelihoods transformation, the formation and regulation of livelihoods vulnerability and livelihoods sustainability. These prospects and reviews would help to offer revelation and reference for domestic relevant researches.
Rurality has always been a central topic of rural studies in the West. Discussions on its definitions have been quite complex, contested and even ambivalent, reflecting recent dramatic changes occurring in rural economies, politics and social cultures. In tradition, rurality has been regarded as a given nature that is self-evident, generalized and one-dimensional. However, with the post-modern transformation of social realities and academic trends, the concept of rurality now focuses on dynamic processes through which diversified and heterogeneous meanings are produced and reproduced. Many scholars have called for a 'post-rural' context from which to understand rural reconstruction in a new era. Just as 'post-modernity' refers to the reflexivity of modernity, the concept of the 'post-rural' has been advanced not to partition phases of rural development, but to realize the reflexive turn occurring in rural studies. The 'post-rural' can be regarded as a 'complex', as multiple actors, events, discourses and practices co-exist and interplay. Hybridity refers to a process of recreation based on the integration of heterogeneous elements together with the elimination of borders between systems. Thus, hybridity is considered to be one of the most useful theoretical perspectives for understanding the essence of rurality in an increasingly complex context. Hence, based on interpretations and analyses of previous literature of the West, this paper proposes a framework on hybridity in 'post-rural' settings based on the following three aspects: (1) hybridity produced by human and non-human actors and trends of rematerialization emphasizing performances and practices in post-rural everyday life; (2) hybridity embedded in fluid networks and relations and dialectical relationships between rurality, globality, and urbanity; (3) hybridity stimulated through rural area's integration into processes of modernization and processes of negotiation occurring between the de-alienation of traditional local cultures and the alienation of modernity. Finally, considering the particularities of the context of rural China, this paper discusses ways in which the perspective of hybridity offers new insights into the studies and practices of Chinese rural reconstruction.
With rapid development of urbanization in the past decades in China, traditional villages' human settlement in China is at a critical stage of overall transformation. Prospective study on progress and mechanism of transformation development of traditional villages' human settlement are of great significant. Using the Citespace V software, this paper analyzed the research hotspot of traditional villages and human settlements. Also the research progress of spatial morphological evolution and reconstruction of traditional villages, socio-cultural inheritance and variation, ecological environment characteristics and adaptation, human settlement renewal and construction, were teased and reviewed. Based on the above analysis and short comments, key fields and research ideas of future research were put forward from the aspects of theory summary, multi-disciplinary integration, technique innovation and model induction. Future research on transformation development of traditional villages' human settlement should be guided by the theory of man-land relationship and strengthened by the in-depth integration of multi-science and technique innovation. Aiming to construct the theoretical system and construction mode of transformation of traditional villages' human settlement, and comprehensive integration of 3D digitization, remote sensing & GIS technology and mathematical model, this paper mainly studied the evolution laws, stage identification, type classification and driving force mechanism of human settlement system of traditional villages. Through analysis of classic cases and comparison of evolution progress and human settlements interaction mechanism of typical models, this paper explored the regional model and scientific path on advancing transformation development of traditional villages' human settlement. Furthermore, based on the theory model for the transformation of traditional villages' human settlement, some counter-measures are put forward in the view of coordinating mechanism of self-organization and hetero-organization, monitoring of eco-environment quality, and traditional culture inheritance and renewal. Meanwhile, the self-organization innovation way of transformation of traditional villages' human settlement should be built by capital investment, policy guidance, and technical support, which provided a critical parameter for the theory of human settlements sciences.
The rise of the great powers is a process of continuous strategic spatial expansion and negotiation of a dynamic strategic balance between the incumbent powers. The strong economic interdependence between China and the United States (the US) is an endogenous variable in their bilateral political relationship. The strategic targeting of potential extraterritorial space and the scramble for economic power are key elements in the Sino-US geopolitical game. Based on balance of power theory, this study used sensitivity and vulnerability indexes to establish the economic power equilibrium zone from a Sino-US interactive view. Results indicate: (1) Spatially, the economic power of China and the US showed contradictory development. The China's spaces of economic power continued expanding to Africa, Europe, and even Latin America, while those of the US shrank to the Americas. Sino-US economic power revealed a pattern of competition in the global East and West. (2) The specific pattern of Sino-US economic equilibrium zones emerged and was highly consistent with Spykman's Rimland Theory of 2014. These zones included the coastal countries in Europe, the coastal countries of North Africa and the Middle East, the countries on the east coast of Latin America, and the coastal countries of South Asia, showing an italic "Y" pattern. (3) Countries in the Sino-US economic equilibrium zones fell into five categories, distinguished by their preferences vis-à-vis Sino-US policy. In the Sino-US geopolitical game, economically developed countries hedged their bets; Resource endowment countries focused on domestic social and economic growth; Policy-economy divided countries tended to support the politics of the US and to rely on China's economy; Strategic channel countries played both sides in the Sino-US game, and edge-isolated countries merely tried to protect themselves. (4) Considering the economy and military forces, Sino-US economic power equilibrium zones were located in the West Pacific Ocean, the coastal areas of Europe, the coastal areas of South Asia, the coastal areas of the Middle East and North Africa, and the coastal areas of Latin America.
The essence of the South China Sea Issue is an islands sovereignty and maritime demarcation dispute between China and its neighboring countries. The territorial disputes in the South China Sea have disrupted the geopolitical structure in East Asia. And the Huangyan Island is important to China's sovereignty, national security and future development. So this paper points out that, in the new era, China should introduce wise political wisdom, great diplomatic skill and powerful military capacity to settle the dispute. This paper summarized the Western and Chinese geographers' achievements and deficiencies of Politics of Scale during the past decades. Based on the theory of Politics of Scale, this paper not only analyzes the Huangyan Island's dispute between China and the Philippines, but also discusses the dispute-related countries' approaches to applying, contesting and transforming the scale on the geopolitical space of the South China Sea, while these countries mainly include China, the Philippines and U.S. Results show that: (1) The new structure of geopolitical scale is a kind of multi-dimensional structure, and it will be restructured in a dynamic way in the process of the contest between the Great Powers outside the region and the regional countries. (2) The most important strategies to achieve the transformation of scale include overcoming the inefficiency caused by the path dependency, sensing the scale in a keen way and possessing a strong right of scale definition. (3) "The Scale of Expression" and "Public Opinion" are becoming critical factors altering the power structure and determining the success or failure of a Scale Game. And in the process of scale contest, the geopolitical stakeholders' control ability of Public Opinion's instrument can directly affect the restructuring of geopolitical structure. China's claim to its sovereignty has long been misrepresented and ignored by most of the Western mainstream medias. Therefore, an improvement of Chinese Government's own voice on the international stage is needed in order to make up this phenomenon. (4) Individuals are becoming important participants of international politics, especially when people are exposed to territorial disputes and when other countries are becoming more nationalistic, more patriotic, and more racist, the microcosmization and fragmentation of scale political space make scale's production and construction more complicated. In the future, when facing the South China Sea Issue, China should find a new reasonable balance between macro and micro politics of scale, in order to maintain the sovereignty over the South China Sea.
As a typical complex system, man-land system is known as a coupled human and natural system. The complexity of man-land system can be divided into three critical dimensions - temporal complexity, spatial complexity and decision-making complexity. In modeling complex systems, traditional models are deficient in displaying data in multiple dimensions, and thus require additional research. Recent studies suggest that the agent-based models (ABM) would provide insights on exploratory analysis and serve as one of the key tools for complex system studies. In contrast to traditional models, ABM pays more attention to the study of 'people', focusing on assessing the influence of human activities on the environment, and can reflect it in a spatially explicit way. The models usually contain three parts: (1) environmental layer, which is composed of natural/social attribute such as terrain slope, land price and traffic condition; (2) agent layer, consisting of one or more agent types with specific attributes; (3) behavior rule, standardizing the mutual consultation and decision-making mode of agents. ABM adopts a 'bottom-up' approach by applying the relevant actors and decisions at the micro-level to producing an observable macro-phenomenon, and displaying high complexity values in three dimensions. Currently, ABM approaches are widely used to model human-environment interactions in various fields, including transportation, financial markets and tourism management. After the basic principles of agent-based simulation are briefly introduced, this paper reviews the application of ABM in ecological process, ecological resource management and land use/cover change. However, as a new method, ABM is still at an exploratory stage, faced by issues including replication potential, empirical parameterization and model validation, individual decision making, and integration with other models. Although there are many challenges, the recent developments reflect an encouraging trend towards developing a new methodology for dynamic spatial modeling of human-environment interactions. The outlook of ABM is promising.
In the context of the integrated development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region as a national strategy and the construction of Xiongan New Area, it is necessary to analyze the relationship of economic growth between large cities and small cities in this region. This paper examines the existence of "agglomeration shadow" and the "poverty belt around Beijing and Tianjin" suggested by the Asian Development Bank in 2005. The previous research of the "poverty belt around Beijing and Tianjin" did not conduct systematic analyses and empirical tests from the perspective of spatial interactions. The literature on spatial interactions has not reached an agreement on whether large cities are conducive to the economic growth of small cities. This paper aims to provide academic evidence for the coordinated development of the BTH region. The results reveal that the core cities in this region did curb the economic growth of small cities around them, supporting the "agglomeration shadow" proposed by new economic geography and the phenomenon "poverty belt around Beijing and Tianjin". Negative spillovers of economic growth exist among small cities as well, which could be attributed to the cut-throat competitions among small cities owing to the urgent desire for economic development of local governments. Compared with the Yangtze River Delta region where core cities benefit the economic growth of their adjacent cities, the radiating function and the trickle-down effect of core cities within the BTH region are obviously weak, and the development gap between large and small cities is greater. These conclusions indicate that to a great degree, the harmonious development of the BTH region is related to the radiation effects of the large cities, and the "agglomeration shadow" should be transformed into a sunshine zone of economic growth. In other words, a polycentric and reasonable urban hierarchy is crucial. From this point of view, the construction of the Xiongan New Area, as an anti-magnetic center just meets the need. This strategy will not only ease the pressure on Beijing, but also provide a new growth pole which helps to benefit the balance of regional economic growth and improve the "poverty belt around Beijing and Tianjin". The policy implications include: using the opportunity of constructing the Xiongan New Area to build a multi-centered spatial pattern with the government's active guidance and the function of the market mechanism; understanding the importance to form a rational and orderly spatial structure of urban system; breaking the obstacles owing to administrative boundaries among cities to promote the regional integration.
Will the increase of the urbanization rate exacerbate haze pollution? Against the background of China's vigorous promotion of new-type urbanization, how to answer this question scientifically is very important. This paper uses the air quality index (AQI) to measure haze pollution, and spatial simultaneous equations were constructed to study the interactive relationship and spatial effects of the urbanization rate and haze pollution. Generalized spatial three-stage least squares (GS3SLS) were used to estimate parameters. The results show that the urbanization rate has a significant negative impact on haze pollution and that haze pollution also has a significant negative impact on the urbanization rate. Both of them have significant spatial spillover effects. Increase in the urbanization rate of the surrounding area will have a negative effect on local haze pollution. Similarly, increased haze pollution in the surrounding area will have a negative effect on the local urbanization rate. This conclusion explains why haze pollution control cannot be conducted alone; collaborative governance between neighboring areas is the only effective solution. Group study further corroborated this conclusion. With the increase in the urbanization rate, haze pollution was gradually reduced. The estimation results of group 2 (urbanization rate ≥60.8%) were more significant than those of group 1 (urbanization rate <60.8%). With an increased urbanization rate, its negative influence on haze pollution become more and more significant. Specifically, when the urbanization rate was less than 60.8%, if it increased by 1%, haze pollution would drop by 0.0143%. When the urbanization rate was greater than or equal to 60.8%, if it increased by 1%, haze pollution would decline by 0.0178%. The study also found that, with the increase in urbanization rate, there exists an "N curve" relationship between the level of economic development and haze pollution. This can play a warning role for areas with a high urbanization rate. In addition, the increase in R&D investment did not inhibit haze pollution. This result implies that there may be an energy rebound effect caused by technological progress in China. China should study how the market mechanism works together with fiscal policy to carefully deal with the emergence of this energy rebound effect.
It is growing to be the significant mission for the behavioral schools of geography to construct a generalized theory explaining the interaction between space and behavior. It is also an urgent realistic demand for current urban development and transformation in China to summarize the conceptual model and explanatory model of space-behavior interaction combined with China's reality. Firstly, this study builds the theoretical foundation of space-behavior interaction research which takes social-space theory as epistemology, behavioral geography and time geography as methodology, and activity-based approach as practical theory. Secondly, as for the research paradigm, the study argues the space-behavior interaction research needed to combine the place-based paradigm and people-based paradigm, facing current situation of China's urban development. Then this study makes an innovative attempt to propose basic thinking of space-behavior interaction theory construction. It needs to carry out research on spatial effects on behavior and behavioral effects on space to construct a generalized space-behavior interaction theory. On this basis, the diversity and similarity of space-behavior interaction in various cities, the trends and dynamics of spatial-behavioral interaction in different periods of time, the distinctiveness of various population segments, need be testified to improve the theory construction.
Community construction(She-Qu Jian-She) is a top-down movement of building urban-grassroots-management unit by the central government, aiming to construct a spatial unit to replace Danwei while Danwei system was collapsing. This movement emerged during the 1990s, while fading out of the public concern nowadays. Since it pays strong intention on reconstructing power space, this paper attempts to review the route through which community construction policy forms and its core discourse in the perspective of territorialization theory in political geography, and accordingly looks into China's society building issue. It points out that, the central government attempts to construct a territorial governance system taking community(She-Qu) as medium after 2000, and emphasizes the spatial design and the spatial narratives of community to claim territorialization in the core policy document. However, after its temporary failure, it turns to community service policy, which emphasizes downscale of state's welfare and reflects state's changeable attitude toward community construction. Finally, this paper contends that, in order to strengthen community's practical significance, it is necessary to enrich research of grassroots community governance and take measures to fix the territorial system of community.
Social and Cultural Geography (or SCG, for short), an academic journal with an international reputation in the areas of social and cultural geography, has created an interdisciplinary platform for scholarly discussions related to the spatiality of society and culture. Based on the statistical analysis of 949 articles that have been published since 2000 when the journal was launched, this paper attempts to take a close look at the authors, research areas, topics, the methods of data collection and analysis, in SCG with the aid of Citespace and Histcite software. We found that: (1) The number of published papers substantially grew and the research areas and source of authors are continually internationalized, which implies that social and cultural geography is increasingly internationally-recognized; (2) The research interests have witnessed the "cultural turn" and "policy turn" within geography, mainly focusing upon the emerging topics like power, identity, memory, home, mobility, race, religion, music and food, all of which are human-centered and highly relevant to social issues; (3) The research articles in SCG are mainly engaged in qualitative approaches, like interview, ethnography, participant observation, and focused group. (4) The Western scholars prefer multiple ways of data collection and evidence displaying including text analysis, analytical comparison, visual aid, which are less commonly used in China's geo-journals. In conclusion, by classifying and analyzing the journal articles published in SCG, this article tries to capture the up-to-date research tendency and methodological approaches in current Western social and cultural geographical academia in order to provide some insights for domestic geographical research.
As a top-down design, China's urbanization is building upon a "growth oriented model". In this sense, scholars and policy makers in China are focusing more on urban growth and spatial expansion. Recently, China has entered a period of "New Normal" (Xin Chang Tai") and faced the supply side reform. Urban shrinkage in terms of population has also emerged in Chinese cities. Especially, some mining industry cities in Northeast China have been losing their population and are also associating with a weak GDP/local fiscal growth rate. As one of the major challenges that China may be confronted with in the new-type urbanization, urban shrinkage should be regarded as an important issue addressed by geographers. Hereby we invited concerning scholars from the area of human-economic geography, urban-rural planning, regional science and public policy in this debate to conduct academic discussion towards urban shrinkage in China, aiming to demonstrate their up-to-date understandings upon emerging shrinking cities in China for sustainable development from various perspectives.
The "Perspectives and Contention" in Geographical Research established in January 2015 show the characteristic of journal but also increase researcher approval degree for the paper's academic value of Chinese journals. On the basis of 49 document records from "Perspectives and Contention" in Geographical Research during 2015-2017, the paper conducted an integrated bibliometrics analysis in respect to characteristics of authors, research institution, keywords, funding situation, cited situation. The results show that: (1) These papers published in "Perspectives and Contention" of Geographical Research has high academic quality and reflected the research achievements of China's highest academic level in the field of geography. (2) These papers focus on the human geography, a comprehensive of human geography and physical geography. (3) It is shown that these papers possess evident practicability and applicability, and have higher influence. (4) Strategies to establish brand column or characteristic column and publish high quality papers are important to promote the journal quality and expand social consequence.
