Since 1909, China has witnessed rapid development of geography as well as hard times of the subject. The geography in China has undergone four stages, namely the launch of contemporary geography, the founding of New China to the late 1970s, reform and opening up to the late 1990s, and the early 21st century. On the occasion of the centennial celebration of The Geographical Society of China, the author dedicates this article to the geographers who have made contributions to China and the world during the past 100 years.
Chinese modern geography is the production of the interactions between West and China. George B. Cressey is a non-negligible western geographer in Chinese modern geography, who established Geology and Geography Department in Shanghai College, and trained some Chinese geologists and geographers; whose abroad and in-depth fieldworks corrected many errors in Chinese geographic texts; whose Chinese geographic research and works sharpened the understanding of Chinese geography, and promulgated Chinese geographic knowledge. At the same time, Cressey's frequent and extensive intercourses with Chinese geographic scholars promoted more modernization and internationalization of Chinese geography. Moreover, Cressey's activities, to some extent, also reflected the track of Chinese modern geography.
Chinese human geography, as a branch of geography, has played an important role in the service of development for the country since the reform and opening up, at the same time, the process of national development has flourished the disciplines of human geography. However, much discussion has taken place on the status of human geography, in particular the debates have been long focused on human geography research methodology. In the context of globalization, the world needs to understand China, and China needs to enter the world system, thus in this process human geography will become even more important than ever. This paper explores the development process of human geography, and highlights the role that human geography has played as a major part of geography. On the one hand, economic, social and political changes in China have promoted the development of human geography, and on the other hand, Chinese human geography can make its due contributions to the development of the country with the enhancement of China's international economic status. Besides, human geography has its own law of development and research methods. We should emancipate the mind, and pay more attention to the law of value in economics, the value of social justice in social science, natural landscape and historical analysis methods, and analysis of quantity. There is a need to deepen and innovate the Chinese human geography research as well as to upgrade its results obtained in previous studies.
During the 30 years of development in tourism geography in China between 1978 and 2008, many researchers analyzed and evaluated its development in different periods. However, most of such studies were done from the perspective of geography of tourism itself, without taking the perspectives such as China's social and economic development, overall academic development as well as the background of tourism activities. This paper reflects and evaluates the three periods of development in tourism geography based on the differences of research orientation: the periods of idealism, realism and rational idealism. In the idealism period, major development in tourism geography was shown by the fact that scholars constructed the scope of the subject of study and the framework for research as well as kept up with the theoretical development abroad. While educating the next generation of scholars, they were also involved in problem-solving by making contribution to the society. They set up the association for the study of tourism geography to strengthen collaboration. In the period of realism, geographers of tourism became the major force for tourism planning. Their research was driven by what they did as planners, with less effort on theoretical development. As a result, their research scope was relatively narrow with less attention to development abroad and lack of paradigms. In the rational realism period, scholars paid more attention to theory construction, with more interdisciplinary studies at the aim of broadening research scope and more international exchanges. In the meantime, planning was of higher standard, and tourism geography as a subject of study received more attention and support in academic circle. This paper points out that the rational realism being discussed is based on individual cases rather than large-scale reality. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether such rational realism is going to continue in the near future.
Rural hollowing is a widespread phenomenon all over China, especially in traditional agricultural areas. From the dynamic viewpoint, rural hollowing is a special evolution form of rural areal system during the process of urban-rural transformation development. In terms of its natural function and task, rural geography has unique advantages to research rural hollowing. From the comprehensive, dynamic and regional perspectives, these advantages of rural geography are mainly the phenomenon description and spatial models establishment of rural hollowing, formation mechanism and dynamic force simulation, response mechanism and comprehensive effect, as well as potential types and its optimal regulation This paper puts forward a series of propositions which should be studied based on theoretical disciplinary system of rural geography. Therefore this paper refines and develops the theoretical foundation of rural geography for rural hollowing research. The theoretical system includes the lifecycles of rural hollowing evolvement, spatial pattern of generation development, mechanics theory of rural hollowing and "Three Integration" model. Then based on the theory research of rural space reconstructions and rural hollowing regulation, integrating with analysis of influencing factors on spatial pattern and evolvement of rural settlement, this paper develops a framework for the succession, evaluation and regulation of rural hollowing. Finally, taking Yucheng city in Shandong province as a typical case, this paper constructs the basic criterion, development concept and planning schemes for the regulation of hollowed villages in Yucheng city, which is the theoretical practice of rural geography. In order to guide new countryside construction, ensure warning line of cultivated land and co-ordinate land use allocation between urban and rural areas in China, it is necessary to conduct a through investigation on the mechanism, policy and mode innovation involved "trinity" by implementing village renovation demonstration project.
With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, there is a phenomenon of hollowing villages resulting from the vacancy and idleness of rural housing in the core of villages in the vast rural areas of China. It is a unique spatial morphology of China's rural settlements shaped by a "dual track" structure of rural-urban socio-economic development. The formation and evolution of hollowing villages is closely interrelated with the spatial organization of the activities of the rural population and the migration flows between town and country and between rural areas. Based on the characteristics of rural housing land-use, an evolutive model of the development stages of hollowing villages was constructed. Usually, there are four evolutive stages in a normal development process of hollowing villages at the urban-rural fringe, i.e., solidization, subhollowing, hollowing and resolidization, which corresponds with the temporal characteristics of China's socio-economic development. However, China has a vast territory with obvious regional differentiation in the level of socio-economic development, which contributes to coexisting different evolutive stages of hollowing villages in the same period, in provincial even larger scale. The influencing factors of hollowing village formation and evolution include four aspects such as economic factors concerning economic growth and technological level, socio-cultural factors embracing population change, social and land-use main body behaviors, institutional and managerial factors including land property right, price and policy, and bio-physical factors. Accordingly, the evolutive types of hollowing villages were classified, and using high-resolution remote sensing data and household investigations, the evolutive characteristics and its driving mechanism of the evolution of hollowing village types in plain agricultural region were studied.
Statistical methods were employed in this paper to explore the driving forces of residential land prices in Beijing, including accessibility, land intensity, cultural and sport infrastructure and new transport methods. Box-Cox transformations, T-test, Pearson correlation, factor reduce and ridge regression were carried out to identify the key factors that influence the residential land price. Distances to the nearest CBD (P = 0.265), to the nearest road (P = 0.529), to the nearest schools (P = 0.202), to the nearest parks (P = 0.105) and to the nearest hospitals (P = 0.706), which had a low correlation with residential land price, were excluded by Pearson correlation test. Independent samples T-test showed that cultural and sport infrastructure (P = 0.003) and urban subways (P = 0.000) had statistical significant influence on residential land price. Thus, factors including distances to the central area and railway stations, plot ratio, public bus lines within 1 km, urban subways as well as cultural and sport infrastructure were studied in this paper. Factor reduce found that all the remaining factors could be divided into 4 groups. This result was used as one piece of judgment for the regression results, which should use at least one factor of each group. Ridge regression is one of the least-squares refinement methods. In this method, a biased constant is employed to find out a biased estimator, which helps to enhance the precision compared with least-squares methods. It has been proven that the ridge regression method is stable and valid when independent variables are highly correlated. Thus, the multicollinarity among the independent variables in this paper could be resolved by ridge regression analysis. Results of ridge regression indicated that the effects of the studied factors mentioned above accounted for 73.2% change of the independent variable Y in Beijing, and among which, the distance to the central area was the primary factor influencing the price of residential land, followed by the plot ratio. A negative correlation between distance and land price and a positive correlation between plot ratio and land price appeared respectively. Accessibility factors such as bus lines within 1 km had considerable effects on residential land price. Besides, urban subways and cultural and sport infrastructure had a significant value added function to residential land around. Based on statistical analysis, suggestions were proposed in this paper: (1) Land use rate could be improved by enhancing the accessibility and value of suburban areas via land use pattern change and urban subway construction to maximize the land use value. (2) Land use pattern of low efficiency such as 'urban village' could be presented to raise the intensification level of land use to optimize the urban function, thus the urban entity value increased. (3) Cultural and sport infrastructures could help to enhance the additional value of residential land price.
Based on the analysis of remote sensing images (landsat TM and MSS) of Wuxi in recent 30 years, we found that the landscape of urban-rural transition region was in the form of suburban agriculture before market economy took the dominant position (the mid-1990s of China). After that, the landscape of suburban agriculture disappeared. The urban-rural transition region transmuted from suburban, a concept of administrative division, to urban-rural coupling region with new urban-rural relationship. On the other hand, administrative division adjustment lagged behind the transmutation of landscape and social attributes. In this paper, urban built-up area is composed of consecutive city buildings, and urban-rural transition region is the external region of urban built-up area. Urban and rural areas are the complex giant systems that contain many social, cultural, economic, and landscape factors. And the urban-rural integration results in urban-rural coupling region. The term of transmutation represents not only the evolution of things but also the complete change of the essence of things. Transmutation of urban-rural transition region refers to the complete change from quantitative to qualitative of its space and attribute.
Through the establishment of the transmutation model, urban and rural factors in the transmutation of transition region are divided into internal factors (u) and external factors (v) as control variables. According to analysis of the factors influencing the urban-rural transition region, we found that the external control factors, such as the percentage of built-up area and the index of transportation accessibility, are dominant in transmutation. At the same time, external control factors bring about the changes of internal control factors such as non-agricultural employment population, non-agricultural industries, and construction land. The irreversible changes of the factors, such as expansion of built-up area, lead to an irreversible transmutation of urban-rural transition region. So the transmutation is different from normal catastrophe theory model in irreversibility.
Based on the above-mentioned studies, we provide a scientific basis for overall planning of urban and rural region. By accelerating the changes of external conditions of rural region, we can promote the rural development, and also provide a basis for adjustment of administrative divisions of the city to meet the need of economic development. As a result of the rapid expansion of urban built-up area, urban-rural transition region has almost expanded into the entire administrative area. So the further expansion of urban built-up area is bound to create a form of urban and rural interaction beyond the administrative boundaries.
Valley economy, featured by valley development, is a new mode in mountainous area development, and prenents a distinguishing economic geographic pattern. The special spatial coupling relations in the distribution of different mountainous elements in valleys are new subjects for the mountain development studies, and such studies are meaningful both for researches and practices. Based on the long term researches on mountainous area development and following a brief exploration into the connotations and the spatial organizing process of valley economy, the authors analyzed the present situations of the development of valley economy in Beijing's mountainous areas, studied the characteristics and the impacts of the spatial structural changes of the valley economy in these areas, and finally proposed a rational arrangement of the spatial structure of the valley economy in Beijing. It is indicated that valley economy plays an important role in the development and functional transformation in Beijing in the new stage. Firstly, valley economy is not outlined by the administrative boundaries, and it connects most of the villages in the mountainous areas along the major transportation lines. Therefore, valley economy can exert positive influence on the development of the mountainous areas, at least in the aspects such as industrial restructuring in the mountainous areas and the coordinated development of rural and urban areas. In addition, it is found that the valley economy of Beijing has evolved in a spatial organizing stage of secondary concentration, which is characterized by resource-saving, ecological protection and industrial optimization. Therefore, the development of valley economy will be helpful to the coordination between ecological protection and economic development in the mountainous areas, and will promote the comprehensive development of these areas. The developing mode of the valley economy in the mountainous areas of China will provide the basis for the decision-making in the transformation of the functional roles of the mountainous areas of Beijing, and on the other hand, it will present experiences for the studies in the mountainous areas outside Beijing.
The research on cognition of city name, city image and cognition of distance and the cognitive distortions of urban space are the important parts of urban spatial cognitive study. Place names abroad include two aspects: One is to discuss the human emotion and the meaning of place names through its origin. The other is to study the differences of cognitive space in different spatial scales. In China, there are relatively few studies on urban spatial cognition. Most of the studies focus on the cognition of city image, while there is insufficient research on cognitive differences, cognition rate of names and correspondence. This paper aims to analyze the spatial cognition pattern in Beijing based on a large amount of cognition rate data by investigation. The objective is to set up the spatial association pattern between geographical locations and residents in different places. Spatial cognition data are obtained by questionnaires, which included properties of residents, cognition rate and so on.
This paper uses the spatial analysis method to discuss spatial difference of recognition rate of place names of Beijing and spatial cognitive correlation pattern of cognition places and sub-districts based on different cognition places and sub-district types divided by cognition rate and position relations. Three conclusions can be drawn as follows. Firstly, the difference of spatial cognition in Beijing is obvious. Judged from different types of cognition place, the cognition rate in the southern part of urban and suburban areas is low and centralized, and it is low and divergent in the northeastern suburbs while high and centralized in the western urban and suburban areas, and it is high and divergent in the southeast of urban areas. Seen from the sub-district type, the cognition rate of sub-districts in urban areas is high and that of the periphery is low, which displays the central-marginal structures. Secondly, there are different associative patterns between distance and cognition rate of 23 cognition places by various types of streets, such as short distance-low cognition rate, short distance-high cognition rate, medium distance-medium cognition rate, long distance-low cognition rate, and long distance-high cognition rate. The influence of distance on cognition rate is changing for different associative patterns. Thirdly, there are twin peaks on the space cognition curve of Beijing. One represents short distance-high cognition rate, and the location is changed with the change of cognition places. The other represents long distance-high cognition rate, which mainly lies in the urban central area.
Tourism destination circle(TDC) is a kind of destination region, which is defined as a spatial collaborating organization, which inhabits a certain geographic space, and has one or several tourism distributing centers as well as many tourism areas (or tourism attraction complexes), It can supply enough products and services for an effective visit. Here, the scale of an optimum TDC is of vital importance: If the scale is beyond the actual demand of visitors, then the TDC is inefficient and some tourism resources (or products) are wasted; if the scale is less than the actual demand of visitors, then the visitors cannot be fulfilled and the TDC cannot develop well. In this paper, tour-time (T, including traveling time T0 and visiting time T1, unit: days) and tour-diameter (?渍, unit: kilometers) are introduced to measure the scale of TDC, in which tour-time is a scale from temporal dimension while tour-diameter is a scale from spatial dimension. Two computable models on the scale of an optimum TDC are proposed based on statistical analysis of the data gathered from more than 600 travel itineraries, which are applied in the Yangtze River Delta as an example. The research shows that: 1) There is a high significantly positive correlation between the scale of an optimum TDC and the traveling distance (D, unit: kilometers), in which T1 = 0.0715D0.5655 and T0 = 0.1908D0.4601, while ?渍 = 0 (if D ≤322) or ?渍 = 253.6lnD - 1464.6 (if D > 322). 2) When we consider only market factors, the demand of tourism market within 300 kilometers from a destination region is the basic force for the development of tourism areas, and then the formation and expansion of TDCs are induced by the demand of tourism market beyond 300 kilometers from the destination regions. The increase of TDC is convergent, which should be less than 600 kilometers. 3) The scale of TDC will "transfer" from one state to another based on "time-space linkage" between continuous tour-time and discrete tour-diameter, which leads to the formation of a nested structure of TDC.
The elements of the sense of place in tourism attractions generate various tourist-experience designs, and they act the role of guiding tourists with diversified cultural backgrounds to gain assorted experiences and cognition, which form the comprehensive sense of tourist-experience. "Sense of Place" is an academic concept consisting of two aspects: the objective characteristics of place and the subjective cognition from human beings. And sense of place in tourism attractions contains two parts: place identity and place dependence. Place identity derives from the visitors' perception, emotion, and it is sensory to the place characteristics and the visitors' reflection of the place authenticity. Place dependence primarily originates from the experiences of functional elements of the place. On the basis of summarizing the elements of sense of place in tourism attractions, this paper formed a framework of measuring system of three parts: the background of place of the tourism attraction, the background of tourists, and the contents of the sense of place. The three parts are subdivided into 11 factors: 1) the diversity of cultural background of the tourist place; 2) the category of the main landscape; 3) the gender of tourists; 4) the age of tourists; 5) the occupation of tourists; 6) the level of education of tourists; 7) the sense of place of tourism attraction before visiting; 8) the characteristics of place; 9) the authenticity of place; 10) the dependence of place; and 11) the comprehensive evaluation of satisfaction. Under the framework of measuring system, the paper conducts a questionnaire, on a sample pool of 397 representative tourists to investigate the cognition of visitors' sense of place of tourism attractions and then uses Pearson correlation analysis to examine the cognitive variables of sense of place. The correlation analysis shows that factor 1 "the diversity of cultural background of the tourist place" is the most significant factor of sense of place of tourism attractions; factor 4 "the age of tourists", factor 6 "the level of education of tourists", and factor 7 "the sense of place of tourism attraction before visiting" have positive impact to some extent. The paper further indicates that the sense of place of tourism attraction is an essential element in evaluating the satisfaction of tourists with tourism attraction. In conclusion, this paper discusses the regular pattern of visitors' cognition of sense of place, and gives some suggestions to the development, planning and management of tourism attractions.
