Today, air transport plays an important role in transportation systems, especially for medium and long distance. Based on complex network theory, Chinese aviation network is abstracted as a set of edges (linkages) connecting a set of nodes (cities), and 144 cities and 1018 air routes were chosen for this research operated from winter 2007 to spring 2008. Then, this paper analyzes the spatial structure of Chinese aviation network using indices of degree distribution, the average path length, the clustering coefficient, degree-degree correlation, and clustering-degree correlation. Degree is the number of edges that a node shares with others, and thus symbolizes the importance of the node in the network. Degree distribution is used to reflect the distribution function of degree and donates the statistical characteristics of a network. Average path length is defined as the average number of edges along the shortest paths for all possible node-pairs in the network and it is a measurememt of the efficiency of transportation network. The clustering coefficient of a node is the ratio of actual edges to maximal edges between nodes which are directly connected with the node. The clustering coefficient of the whole network is the average of all individuals. As for an airport network, the average path length and the clustering coefficient are the two most important parameters reflecting network properties and configurations. The results show that Chinese aviation network has a relatively small average path length of 2.23 and a relatively large cluster coefficient of 0.69. More importantly, the accumulative degree distribution follows an exponential expression, with significance of 0.977. Therefore, Chinese aviation network shows the characteristic of a "Small World" network. Due to most new airports' preferences for direct connections with the three top-level national hubs: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the network hierarchy has no distinct difference with the exception of the top one. Also, the spatial distribution of Chinese aviation network is imbalanced according to the indices of degree, clustering coefficient and accessibility index. Besides, the correlation coefficients of these indices mentioned above are analyzed. The results show that there are negative degree correlation, nonlinear clustering-degree correlation, positive accessibility-degree correlation, and slightly positive clustering-accessibility correlation. In conclusion, with the rapid development of air transport demand driven by the market economy, Chinese aviation network will further evolve to a combined model of "Scale Free" and "Small World" networks, and its spatial structure will be more complex.
Xinjiang is characterized by oasis economy with abundant resources including energy and vulnerable eco-environment. The promotion of harmonious development of new-type industrialization and urbanization in this region is an effective way to enhancing regional economy and achieving sustainable development of resources and environment. Based on the regional economic system composed of 12 oasis cities along the railway lines in this region, firstly, two sub-systems (new-type industrialization system and urbanization system) are constructed under the "urban-industry" system. This paper analyzes the interactive mechanism of two sub-systems. By building models of synchronism index, coupling factor and validity index, the harmonious degree was measured as follows: in-phase grade of development speed, system operating status and the contribution to regional economy. The paper also analyzes the spatial-temporal differentiation of harmonious degree for the years of 2000, 2004 and 2007, respectively. Besides, four types of harmonious degrees and their corresponding systemic characteristics of oasis cities are summarized in 2007. The results indicate that policies play a crucial part in the regional development, and that there are marked North-South differences in systemic harmonious degree, presenting a spatial pattern: "core cities (Urumqi, Karamay, Korle) at high-level harmonious degree, cities at average-level widely distributed and low-level occupying southern Xinjiang". At the same time, the number of low-level cities is decreased. From 2000 to 2007, synchronism index tends to be "1" and core cities are relatively good. The value of coupling factor is small in general but some lowest-level cities make extraordinary progress. And, on the whole, validity index is remarkable and rises steadily. In 2007, the types of systemic harmonious degree of 12 cities can be described as "one tip-top, three highs, six averages, and two lows", with each having its own basic characteristic.
The issue of economic development disparities has become one of the hot topics in the academic study. This paper intends to discuss the issue by taking Huaihai Economic Zone as a research object, which is a typical provincial border-region. First, this paper introduces the development of Huaihai Economic Zone and the extent of academic domain. Then it makes a critical review on research into economic development disparities. Supported by softwares of SPSS and ArcGis, the authors select 126 counties of Huaihai Economic Zone as research units, and use the data from statistical yearbooks of Huaihai Economic Zone cities covering the years of 1995, 2000 and 2005. Based on studies on evolution of economic development disparities, this paper draws some onclusions as follows. From 1995 to 2005, the counties of Huaihai Economic Zone can be divided into four types: the most developed counties, more developed counties, moderately developed counties and hysteretic counties. Huaihai Economic Zone is a less developed region and its intra-regional economic gap has been widened in the 10-year period. North Jiangsu and South Shandong are more developed than East Henan and North Anhui, and South Shandong has developed more quickly than North Jiangsu since 2000. North Anhui was behindhand from 1995 to 2005 in the zone. Some 30% of the counties of Huaihai Economic Zone made steady contribution to the regional development. On this basis, according to economic development level, this paper studies region division. Results show that this zone can also be divided into four areas: the most developed central area, more developed southern area, more developed northern area, hysteretic western area. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions on breaking down administrative barriers, starting Huaihai Economic Zone Planning, and establishing National Overall Planning Regional Trial Zone of Comprehensive Coordinated Reform, so as to achieve comprehensive and harmonious development in the Huaihai Economic Zone.
The CO2 emission brought about by energy, especially the fossil fuels consumption, is an inevitable by-product in the process of economic development. With the increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases (particularly the CO2), the climate has been becoming warmer. Therefore, the relationship between economic growth and CO2 emission has been paid extreme attention in the academia. Although the conventional methodology of econometrics has the advantage of testifying their correlation based on historic data, it lacks the ability of reflecting the dynamic mechanism between energy input and economic growth, which has two counteracting forces that more energy input will improve the productivity and increase the final output on one hand, but on the other hand it will also require more expenditure on energy purchase, so less remained for capital accumulation hence will deduce the final output. To deal with the weakness of econometrics methodology, this paper introduced an endogenous economic growth model. By modifying the Moon-Sonn model, we obtained the necessary condition of the existence of inverse U-shaped relationship between optimal growth rate and energy intensity, that is, the elasticity of energy in production function should be less than 0.5. Empirically, we predicted the energy intensity under present technology progress rate, which is reflected by the rate of energy efficiency improvement, and put it into the model hence it was predicted of the economic growth path with the according energy consumption under the path; Here the Input-Output analysis was applied to predict the decrease rate of energy intensity, which is 4.23% , lower than the eleventh "five-year plan" objective of 4.365%. Finally, the CO2 emission was obtained by aggregating emission from each type of energy, which requires the prediction on energy consumption structure and the estimation of CO2 emission coefficients of various types of energy. Projection results show that the peak of energy consumption and carbon emission will appear in 2043 and 2040 respectively. Furthermore, this paper also simulated the effect of energy intensity decrease rate on the peak of energy and the according per capita GDP, and constructed three scenarios to simulate the effect of reusable energy substitute policy on the peak of CO2 emission. The former simulation demonstrates a sharp influence, the faster energy intensity drops, the earlier energy consumption peaks with less per capita GDP; when the decrease rate is 4.365%, the energy will peak in 2041, 2 years earlier than the reference with the per capita GDP is 125621 Yuan RMB; when the decrease rate is between 4.5%-5%, the peak year of energy consumption will advance to 2040 or even earlier when the per capita GDP will approximately be 100000 Yuan RMB, much approach the situation of OECD member countries. And the scenario analyses show a dramatic decline of emission volume when the proportion of renewable energy rises, but the reusable energy substitute policy have an insignificant influence on the year when the peak of CO2 emission shows up.
Spatial organization of economic activities is of great importance for urban studies and urban planning such as urban morphology and relevant urban developmental policies. Traditional studies however overlook the spatial dependency of economic activities, which leads to our knowledge constrained to the geographical or industrial concentration of a region less considering the inner structure of urban spatial economics. The aim of this paper is to explore the inner structure of urban economic activities for Beijing in the period of 1949-2004. With the indicator of gross employment increasing, the urban spatial-economic organization was investigated by means of exploratory spatial data analysis. Specifically, Local Moran's I was used to examine the increase of gross employment for local spatial associations on a postcode level with Rook Spatial Weights and different distance spatial weights. The result indicated, as the foundation for Beijing spatial-economics, there were no significant economic agglomeration areas in the urban center during 1949-1956. However, in the later 50 years, Beijing was gradually forming a mono-centric spatial organization with a huge nuclear anchored in the urban center. At the same time, some towns in the peri-urban area were developed as islands with less spatial-economic relations with their hinterlands. Instead, they kept a close economic linkage with the urban center or other regions. On the city level, the distance for spatial interactions of economic elements was within 60 km in the planned area to form hinterlands, and expanded to 75 km in 1983-2002 when market economy is oriented. After the revival period in 1949-1956, the evolution of Beijing spatial-economic organization experienced six stages: (1) 1957-1982, the urban center was rapidly developed; (2) 1983-1987, Beijing-Tianjin-Langfang became a major economic corridor; (3) 1988-1992, the north of the urban center was rapidly developed; (4) 1993-1997, the urban area spatially expanded; (5) 1998-2002, the urban center was infilled; (6) 2002-2004, perhaps decentralization took on ensuing with spatial restructuring.
The distribution of population is of great importance to regional economic studies, which helps reveal the characteristics and the development trends of regional spatial structure. This paper applied the regional density function approach to study the concentration and the decentralization of population in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region, one of the largest extended metropolitan regions in North China. Besides, the polycentric regional density function is used to analyze the population growth patterns of the study region. Compared with the classic monocentric density function, the polycentric density function is more appropriate for modeling the modern metropolitan regions, like the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, which usually presents a polycentric pattern. The estimation of the polycentric density function shows the concentration of population into the core urban centers during the 1980s, the coexistence of the concentration of population into multi-urban centers and the decentralization of population from the core urban centers during the 1990s. At the same time, it is shown that three different growth patterns for the urban centers have formed at different levels, namely, the dispersion pattern through decentralization, the dispersion pattern through growth and the concentration pattern. Finally, a dynamic varying parameter model is proposed to identify the determinants of the spatial dynamics of the population distribution and growth, which indicates that the concentration and the decentralization of population within urban centers are influenced by the size, the economic structure and the transportation facilities of urban centers and their changes.
Gospel village refers to a kind of special settlement with more than half of the Christian villagers. Like the other villages in the Pearl River Delta, the old gospel villages in Shenzhen, China, with a history of the Christian church development over 100 years, have witnessed rapid industrialization, urbanization and modernization since the reform and opening up. Along with this process, mode of production, rural landscape and people's way of life all have undergone great changes. In these gospel villages, Christianity is producing less and less effect on the local villagers, yet it is getting revival among the immigration. Through a case study of Sanzhuli gospel village in Shenzhen, this research analyses the dynamic development process of Christianity in this village--the process of its extinction and renascence and further investigates the role that globalization plays in the development of Christianity. Research into gospel villages will not only help enlarge the knowledge of religious geography and rural geography which are unsubstantially developed in China, but also exert great influence on the adjustment of life style, the organization of harmonious society in rural areas and the promotion of healthy religious activities of citizens.
Cross-border tourism region is a geographic unit which has large tourism development potential and complex management object, and becomes a new research focal point in tourism geography. Based on the Inter-Organizational Relationships (IORs) and social network theory, the paper indicates that the spatial cooperation behavior among cross-border tourism regions is essentially the network construction and reorganization of contacts and exchanges between the cross-border tourism organizations. Using the corresponding social network evaluating indicator system, the paper makes an empirical analysis for cross-border tourism region network structure and cross-border cooperation in the Tiantangzhai of Dabieshan, and then the conclusion is verified by core-periphery model. The results show that: (1) In terms of the network density, the whole Tiantangzhai network is smaller compared with the local network density, showing a weak tie between the administrative areas and a strong tie inside the administrative area, meanwhile structural holes are found. The network density between the low level administrative areas is bigger than that between the upper ones. The more cross-border dimensions are, the smaller the network density is. This reflects that there is a significant border effect in the cross-border tourism activity. (2) As to the network degree, the local degree is the biggest, followed by the global degree, and the border degree is the smallest. It is proved that tourism administrative region economy is an influential phenomenon. (3) According to Francisco's integrated model of IORs, the paper discovers that the cross-border tourism cooperation has transferred from a weak phase to a medium phase in Tiantangzhai. To enhance cooperation in Tiantangzhai cross-border region, concrete measures should be taken to achieve the aim of sustainable development by reducing the transactional costs, strengthening the conformity among departments concerned, building the good external environments, and setting up the cross-border tourism alliances.
Culture is an important factor that affects tourists' psychology and behavior. Cross-cultural research on motivation indicated that tourist motivations vary among tourists from different cultural settings, and that even tourists from the same culture have different motivations when they visit different destinations. China has been the fourth top international destination country since 2004, but little is known about inbound tourists' motivation and other behaviors. The primary purpose of this research is to compare the motivation of inbound tourists from five cultural groups. The measurement of tourists' motivation is adapted from the previous research, and the culture variable is measured by nationality. All respondents are divided into five cultural groups according to Hofstede's cultural clusters. The data from over 600 tourists visiting Guilin and Yangshuo are obtained during the period from October to November 2008. The response rate is 95.6%, that is, 578 tourists' data were used in this research. In this study, Chi-square test is used for the test of equality of tourists' demographic variables from five cultural groups, confirmatory factor analysis is used for the applicability test of foreign motivation scales, simultaneous factor analysis for several groups is used for the test of equality of structure and equality of scaling, and ANOVA is used for means comparison. The results show that five cultural group tourists have no difference in sex and marriage status, but have significant difference in occupation. Motivation scales from western research setting can be used in Chinese inbound tourism. CFA identifies that four factors of motivation are constructed, namely, culture, pleasure/fantasy, relaxation, and natural conditions. The test shows that two factor loadings (i.e. "to seek adventure" and "to get away from home") are significantly different, namely, structural invariant is accepted while factor invariant is rejected. The comparisons of motivation item means indicate that 8 out of 14 items have significant cultural difference, that is, Anglo, Germanic and Latin tourists score higher than Asian and Nordic tourists on "to understand more knowledge of new places", "to visit historical and cultural sites" and "to meet local people". Anglo and Asian tourists score higher on "to have fun", and Asian tourists score higher on "to mix with fellow tourists", "to enjoy good weather", and "relaxation". Comparing factor means indicate that tourists motivation strength from Nordic are lower than from Anglo and Latin tourists in terms of factors concerning culture, pleasure/fantasy, and relaxation, Anglo tourists have higher strength on all the three factors, of which culture is dominant motivation of the three groups. The conclusion is drawn as follows. Inbound tourists' motivations are sensitive to culture, that is, tourists from different cultural settings have different dominant motivations. Tourist destination should provide products and services that can satisfy different needs of tourists from different cultural settings, and use tailored marketing strategy so as to form an attractive destination image.
As an effective tool to curb urban sprawl, UGBs (urban growth boundaries) have been paid worldwide attention. According to the implementation mechanism, which is similar to their counterparts in Western countries, the planning urban construction boundaries can be defined as the Chinese UGBs, safeguarded by the latest Town and Country Planning Act enacted in 2008. There are quite a few examples in establishing UGBs. However, the determination of UGBs has not been based on sound scientific analysis in the previous cases. Especially, quantitative analysis was insufficient in the process of determining the boundaries. In this paper, the methodology of constrained CA (cellular automata) was introduced to support the establishment of the UGBs. Compared with traditional methods of establishing UGBs, constrained CA took into account more factors related to urban growth, and could make effective spatio-temporal dynamic simulation influenced by various urban development policies. Taking a case s...更多tudy of Beijing municipal area, we developed the UGBs in the central city, new cities and small towns. The results showed that there was large difference between the urban growth pattern simulated through constrained CA and that projected in the urban master plan. Consequently, the UGBs could be improved according to the simulation result based on constrained CA.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been widely used for research purposes in numerous disciplines. The solution to the increasingly intensified resource and environmental problems requires sophisticated simulation and optimization tools. Geographers need to deal with more data and more complex models for analyzing geographical processes. GIS have a good capability of handling spatial data, but have limitations of performing complex simulation and optimization tasks. This paper first discusses the concepts and methodologies of a Geographical Simulation and Optimization System (GeoSOS). GeoSOS 1.0 is further developed to provide advanced toolboxes for implementing a series of simulation and optimization tasks. As a bottom-up approach, GeoSOS 1.0 consists of three major integrated components, cellular automata (CA), multi-agent systems (MAS), and swarm intelligence (SI). The binding force of this system is the interactions between spatial micro-entities and their environment. The interactions are governed by Tobler's first law of geography. A general form of interaction rules is proposed for the synergy of these three bottom-up components. A set of data mining tools can be used to discover the interaction rules of GeoSOS. The integration of CA with MAS can allow the system to handle various kinds of simulation tasks. Another novelty of this proposed system is its capability of coupling the simulation (CA and MAS) with the optimization (SI). The scenario with the highest accumulative utility value can be identified by using this coupling mechanism. This proposed system provides a new kind of functionality to improve the understanding of natural complex systems.
Taking the example of Acta Geographica Sinica and Journal of Geographical Sciences from 2000 to 2008, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the Chinese geographers' creative age, including the average age, the main groups' age, and the peak age. In comparison with Geographical Review of Japan, it studies the institutional factors affecting the academic age and life cycle of the researchers. We can find that in China the main group of the researchers using Chinese is about 40 years old, while that using English is 30 years old. The average age of Chinese geographers using mother tongue is higher than that of Japanese geographers, while the average age of Chinese geographers using English is lower than that of Japan. This differentiation reflects the difference in the administration and idea of academic research between China and Japan. Based on the discussion of the difference, some suggestions are given to the academic construction of geography in China.
