Enhancing and sustaining the happiness life or the quality of life (QOL) is a primary and ultimate goal of national policy. First, the evolvement tendency and characteristic of national accounting system have been identified. The fundamental characteristic of GDP, green accounting and ISEW is that these accounting systems are still based on measuring how much is being consumed, with the assumption that more consumption leads to more welfare. Happiness or quality of life as a completely different approach shall be taken to look directly at actual well-being achieved, which will separate the means (consumption) from the ends (happiness or QOL) without assuming one is correlated with the other. Secondly, the theoretical implications of human development have been discussed and three constraints have been identified as environmental constraint, equality and efficiency. Based on brief introduction of environmental and social constraints faced by China's human development, we analysed the relationship between economic growth and environmental pressure from the view of consumption and production in China. The overall findings don't support the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, and our theoretical analysis can not support the claim that technological progress cannot reconcile the conflict between economic growth and environmental conservation. China should replace much of their faith in technological progress with the pursuit of other forms of cultural progress. Thirdly, The concept of happiness or QOL and its measurement approach have been introduced. If improving gross national happiness (GNH) is indeed the goal of social policies and programs, it follows that appropriate national aggregate accounting system should attempt to measure the extent to which policies actually improve GNH. GNH can be the measurement components of an overall plan to maximize social well-being. The first step in the process would be to identify the constitutive components of a preferred society in the greatest detail possible through a stakeholder dialogue process. This information would be used to identify the relevant instrumental components. The second step would be to identify the metrics of GNH's instrumental components. Direct measurement, indirect measurement and social choice have been recommended as alternative instruments to resolve the complex measurement. A specific action plan for maximizing GNH can be developed based on the above identifying process. Once these are established, the following four guidelines such as focusing on poor people, developing cyclic economy, considering cultural development and harmonizing the equality and efficiency may be useful in developing a successful plan.
Regional planning is an essential part of spatial governance for a vast country like China. Since inter-regional development problems are getting protruding and the measures of state control at the macro level have changed from rigid central planning to more flexible ones in China, it has become quite urgent to make new regional planning with new perspectives and new methods. This paper firstly analyzes the factors affecting regional spatial planning in China in a new era characterized by economic globalization, further institutional reform (i.e., marketization) and application of scientific approach to development; then analyzes the methodological basis for making regional spatial planning through examining the "pole-axis" theory, global city-region and theory of territorial system of human-land relationship; and lastly introduces some technical methods in making regional spatial planning based on the preliminary planning of key economic regions in developing western China, which was done in 2003. The paper argues that regional spatial planning in China in the new era must take into consideration the key features of the present socio-economic development and effective governance measures. Besides, it is also suggested that regional spatial planning should adopt global perspective and thinking on marketization.
Based on the "shortest path matrix", the selected characteristic indices-distance, time and speed, this paper analyses the current spatial structure of accessibility in the cities which the national trunk highway system connects, and impacts the speed index made. The cities connected by the national trunk highway system turn out the obvious "core-periphery" model with speed index. The top 50 most accessible cities are concentrated in the middle of eastern China, and the bottom 50 ones are located at the periphery such as northwestern, southwestern and northeastern China. The spatial structure of accessibility measured by time index shows a concentric layer structure with attribute falling gradually from interior to periphery. Moreover, the spatial structure of accessibility in cities connected by the national trunk highway system has obvious boundary effect, which shows wave transformation under different speed conditions. The evidence shows that the change in speed acceleration of the national trunk highway system with an urban accessibility of 60-80 km/h is significantly greater than that of 80-100 km/h. For a given city, averaged 33 cities can be reached within eight hours--a normal working day. Most of the cities with the maximum urban access in eighty hours are concentrated in eastern China, averaged 70 cities. The cities with the minimum urban access in eighty hours are located in the northwestern, southwestern, northeastern and southeastern parts of China. Besides further construction, accelerating the speed of the future national trunk highway system will bring about more impacts on the spatial structure of the cities in China.
Lots of theoretical and empirical studies dealing with market area and distance decay model in economic geography have been carried out. According to the theory of market, the main elements that determine market scale are population and economic development level. Tourism firms are often discussed in economic geography because their market area and distance decay rule are clearer than many other kinds of firms. This paper mainly analyzes the relationship between regional economy and performance of China's listed typical tourism firms. Unlike the previous studies, we construct the market area not only from distance but also from its constitutes: population and economic development. In China, different provinces often present differences in economic development level, culture, consumer behaviors, etc. So we take province as the basic unit for analysis, and divide market areas into three levels by distance: the province where the typical sightseeing place is located (located provinces), the provinces neighboring to the located province (neighboring provinces), and the provinces adjacent to the neighboring provinces (hypo-neighboring provinces). The following conclusions are drawn: 1. According to OLS model, one yuan RMB adding to GDP per capita in the located province will generate an income increase of 38.46 thousand yuan to the typical tourism firms, and the prominent level is 8.8%; the case of the neighboring provinces is 37.45 thousand yuan and the prominent level is 10.3%; the GDP per capita of the hypo-neighboring provinces has no prominent influence. According to FE (fixed effect) model, the influence of GDP per capita of the located province is 69.86 thousand yuan and the prominent level is 0.1%; the neighboring province is 52.83 thousand yuan, and the prominent level is 8.9%; and the same as the OLS model, the hypo-neighboring has no prominent influence. So we get the conclusion: the economic development level of the located provinces (GDP per capita) has greater influence on the performance (income from main business) of the typical tourism firms. The neighboring provinces have weaker influence than the located provinces. But the influence of the hypo-neighboring provinces is not apparent at all. This conclusion is consistent with the distance decay rule. 2. When controlling other variables as economic development level, and just judging from the quantity of population, we can not find evidences that there exists apparent relationship between the quantity and the performance of China's listed typical tourism firms in all level market areas, even in the located province. 3. In 2003, the performance of China's typical listed firms decreased evidently compared to 2002 due to SARS which indicates that health and stability of society are crucial to tourism industry.
Tourism has made great progress in China since the implementation of reform and opening-up policy, and the quantity of foreign and domestic tourists has a great increase not only in every province but also in cities. Based on the theory of primate city distribution and rank-size distribution which have been frequently used in urban geography since the 1920s, this paper uses the date of major cities and provinces to explain tourism size distribution on the scale of province and single city in China. Considering the possible error in recording the number of the domestic tourists, this paper selects the number of foreign tourists as the criterion of tourism size. On provincial scale, tourism size distribution follows primate city distribution, Beijing and Guangdong province are the primate province (city) in turn since 1990, the primate quotiety is between 1 to 1.6. What is more, according to the balance of the size and rank change, the tourism size growth mode of the province in China can be classified as equalization mode, accelerate growth mode, decelerate growth mode whereas through regression, tourism size turns out to follow the rank-size distribution on single city scale, the tourism size and its rank accords with the Pareto distribution well. Besides, this paper also discusses the impacts of the facts, such as economic condition, city function, tourism resource and boundary port on tourism size distribution, aiming at offering a new method for research of the tourism size and assisting the formulation of tourism policies at national and regional levels.
This study attempts to examine the structural effects of conditions of tourism development, attachment of local community, tourism-impact, participatory tourism ability's factors on participatory tourism attitude and on local residents' decision-making for tourism development. To achieve the above goal, the research hypotheses are proposed. Four hundred questionnaires by interview survey of randomly selected residents tourism destination at waterfront district in Hefei city. A confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling procedure were performed, respectively, by utilizing the LISREL procedure. The conceptual model of peasants participatory tourism behavior was analyzed with structural equation modeling procedures. In the resulting structural equation model, six hypotheses are supported.
The differences of classification systems between HLZ and land cover are compared in this paper. Based on the conversion probability of each HLZ type to every land cover type, a marginal conversion raster model of land cover is created. This model wins through the difficulty of converting between the two classification systems. After the raster data of HLZ spatial distribution on the basis of the climate change data of HadCM3 A1FI, A2a, and B2a, respectively, being simulated, the marginal conversion model were run with these data, so the scenario data of land cover change of China in 2039, 2069 and 2099 are simulated. Moreover, some landscape index models, as the land cover diversity index and patch connectivity index, are introduced to analyze the landscape changes of land cover in China in the future. The mean center model is introduced to construct a model to calculate the shift distance and direction of the mean center of each land cover type, thus to study the shift trend of the mean centers of the future land cover in China. These results show that: with temperature continuously rising and precipitation keeping increasing, the areas of cultivated land, grassland, wetland, water body, ice and snow cover, and bare rock would decrease; the areas of forestland, construction land, desertified land would increase; especially, the increased rate of forestland is high (2.34% per ten years) and the decreased rate of bare rock is high (2.38% per ten years); the desert area would reduce partly; the land cover diversity and patch connectivity would continuously decrease and increase, respectively.
In this paper we tried to analyze agricultural land use changes in Beijing City, and make clear their spatio-temporal structure. The sectoral structure of cultivated land is closely related to the physical land conditions, so that distribution of agricultural land use is basically determined by land conditions, which is one of the basic driving forces. As regards food crops cultivation, its sectoral structure is closely related to the driving forces as complex of land conditions, industrialization, policies, infrastructure and innovation. Although the sectoral structure of vegetables cultivation is closely related to the available land conditions, it is more important for them to develop alternative economic activities with the growth of urbanization and socialist market economy. On the other hand, the sectoral structure of fruits production is most closely related to the enlargement of profitability with the growth of urbanization and socialist market economy rather than the available land condition and alterative economic activities. Following our discussion, it seems to be concluded that sectoral differences of agricultural land use in Beijing City have been generally presented since the 1980s. This sectoral structure has been closely related to the complex of driving forces such as land conditions, agricultural policies, the alternative economic activities and urbanization. In addition, we calculated through mesh data of village and township statistics in Beijing City. Food crops productivity will be raised greatly due to constant agricultural technology innovation, and food crops land ratio will rise to 75% by 2020. Vegetables productivity will make marked progress in the inner urban fringe, and it will decrease greatly in the outer urban fringe of Beijing City. Vegetables land ratio will also reach 15% by 2020. Types of fruits productivity and culture of fruits over Beijing City by 2020 will not change much than now.
Ranging from 83o41' to 95o11'E and from 30o27' to 35o39'N, northern Tibet in the highest of Tibet is known as the ridge of the roof of world with a mean elevation of 4500 m. Northern Tibet is the headstream of the Yangtze River, Nujiang River and Lancang River. It is both the "sensitive area" of climate system and the "water tower" of China. The environmental condition of this area has significant effect on the main rivers, climate and eco-environment of Tibet and the whole country, even on the globe for its rigorous natural condition and fragile ecosystem. This study selected vegetation cover as the main evaluation index, calculated the grassland degradation index (GDI) and established the remote sense monitoring and evaluation system for grassland degradation in northern Tibet, according to the national standard (GB19377-2003), based on the remote sensing data such as NDVI data derived from NOAA/AVHRR with a spatial resolution of 8 km of 1981-2000 and from SPOT/VGT with a spatial resolution of 1 km of 2001 and from MODIS with a spatial resolution of 0.25 km of 2002-2004 respectively in this area, in combination with the actual condition of grassland degradation. The grassland degradation processes and their response to climate change during 1981-2004 were discussed and analyzed systematically in the study. The result indicated that grassland degradation in northern Tibet is very severe, and mean value of the GDI in recent 20 years is 2.54 which belongs to the severe degradation grade. From 1981 to 2004, the grassland degradation fluctuated evidently with great interannual variations in proportion of degradation degree and GDI but the total tendency turned to severe during this period with the grassland degradation grade changed from light to severe in northern Tibet. The extremely seriously degraded and seriously degraded respectively occupied 1.7% and 8.0% of the study area, the moderately and lightly degraded grassland accounted for 13.2% and 27.9% respectively and un-degraded grassland occupied 49.2% of the total grassland area in 2004. The grassland degradation was severe especially in the conjunctive area of Naqu, Biru and Jiali counties, the headstream of the Yangtze River that is Galadandong snow mountain, the areas along the Qinghai-Tibet railway and highway, and areas around the Tanggula and Nyainqentanglha snow mountains and glaciers. So the snow mountains and glaciers as well as their adjacent areas in northern Tibet which were sensitive to climate change and the areas along the vital communication line with frequent human activities experienced relatively severe grassland degradation.
On maintaining ecological balance and promoting economical development, it is necessary to strengthen the spatial relation among the landscape patterns whose functions are similar. The growing awareness of the adverse effects of habitat fragmentation on natural systems has resulted in a rapidly increasing number of actions to reduce current fragmentation of natural systems as well as a growing demand for tools to predict and evaluate the effect of changes in the landscape on connectivity in the natural world. For promoting and positioning functions of each landscape unit in the whole Taiwan island, systematically studying characteristics of landscape patterns in the research areas, and identifying energy routes of landscape function flows, this study chooses the basic regionalism units as the research areas such as Wuxi watershed to analyze connectivity traits among network nodes with single function as well as spatial interactions of different functional networks based on landscape function network establishment. Then from the aspect of consolidating network configuration to strengthen landscape functions, this study puts forward some strategies to optimize landscape patterns. Through linkage analysis of network nodes, it is found that urban function network structure is better than ecological function network in Wuxi watershed, and most urban function sub-nodes are located around the urban function centers, which can allow landscape functions export and transmit. The connectivity of ecological function nodes is similar, but the first and second level nodes such as Hongxiang and Gaomei wetlands are isolated and less connected, so this study proposes to consolidate function transmitting routes and highlight significance of main transferring nodes like Erzhaishan and Beikengzi aiming at optimizing ecological landscape in Wuxi watershed.
During the springtime periods of frequent sand-dust event occurrences, we investigated the landforms, soils, vegetations and impacts of human activities in the Junggar Basin, which is one of the important source regions of sand-dust events in China, and took the samples and data of soils and vegetations. The physical-chemical properties of these soil samples were analyzed, and the characteristic indices of these vegetations were calculated. The vegetation cover, community diversity, ecologic dominant degree, topsoil moisture, soil organic matter, soil texture, soil salts and pH were chosen as the ground-surface parameters/variables of impacting the process of sand-dust event occurrence. With Canonical Discriminant Analysis of SPSS10.0 software system, this paper effectively discriminates the ground-surface characteristics of the study regions, the Aibi Lake region with high-frequent sand-dust events and the Gurbantunggut Desert with medium-frequent sand-dust events. The results show: in the Aibi Lake region where the gray-brown desert soil and gray desert soil are widely distributed and agricultural reclamations are intensive, the passive factors impacting its ground-surface stability are mainly the high pH values and organic matter contents of soils and the ecologic dominant degrees of vegetations. Then, in the Gurbantunggut Desert where stable and semi-stable aeolian sandy soils are mainly distributed and are less disturbed by human exploitation, the erosion-resistance of its ground-surface benefits from the high vegetation cover, plant community diversity and coarser soil texture. The results of discriminant also show that the agricultural development region in Karamay (Kelamayi) with a large area of the reclaimed land, which belonged to a low frequent region of sand-dust event occurrences, has had the ground-surface characteristics of the regions with high frequent sand-dust event occurrences. This brings forward a caution to the occurrences of calamitous environment issues possibly resulted from human activities.
In this study, plot and watershed scale experiments were conducted to study the effect of some extraordinary rainfalls on the export of nutrients from agricultural land. The results of three-year plot experiments show that more than 50% of annual nitrogen and phosphorus losses via surface runoff happened between June and August, when the monsoon and typhoon rains are heavy and frequent. During the three largest storms, 35.7%-52.4% of the annual N and 46.8%-66.4% of the annual P were exported by surface runoff from different land use types. Nutrient concentrations increased with hydrological process during storm flow, decreased with the prolongation of storms yet remained at higher concentrations compared with base flow time. About 30% of N and more than 40% of the annual P loads were exported from the watershed by the four largest storms. Reducing agricultural practices such as tillage and fertilization during frequent heavy rainfall period are effective ways for mitigating agricultural nonpoint source pollution.
Having analyzed the tree ring width and maximum latewood density of Pinus densata from west Sichuan, we obtained the different climate information from tree-ring width and maximum latewood density chronology. The growth of tree ring width was responded principally to the precipitation in May, which might be influenced by the activity of southwest monsoon, whereas the maximum latewood density reflected the summer temperature (June-September). According to the correlation relationship, a transfer function had been used to reconstruct summer temperature for the study area. The explained variance of reconstruction is 51% (F = 52.099, p < 0.0001). In the reconstruction series: before the 1930s, the climate was relatively cold, and relatively warm from 1930 to 1960, and this trend was in accord with the cold-warm period of the last 100 years, west Sichuan. Compared with Chengdu, the warming break point in west Sichuan is 3 years ahead which shows Tibetan Plateau was more sensitive to temperature change. There was an evident summer warming signal after 1983. Although the last-100 running average of summer-temperature in the 1990s was the maximum, the running average of the early 1990s is below the average line and it was cold-summer; summer-drought presented in the late 1990s.
Based on 740 stations daily precipitation datasets in China, the precipitation- concentration degree (PCD) and precipitation-concentration period (PCP) of different intensity durative precipitation events were calculated to analyze their statistical characteristics, mainly including spatial and temporal distributions, variations and climatic trends of the two parameters of the durative heavy precipitation events in China. It is proved that these two parameters of heavy rainfall can display the temporal inhomogeneity in the precipitation field. And it is also found that there is a good positive relationship between the precipitation-concentration degree and annual rainfall amount in eastern China and central China. This method can be applied in flood assessment and climate changing fields.
The black soil resource of China is famous for its fertility, high organic content, and the best applicability for cultivation. The long-term human activities of over-reclamation and irrational cultivation resulted in water and soil loss on a large scale. Especially the erosion gullies incise the land surface, nibble the field, wash out the fertile soil and degrade the efficiency of the large cultivator. Erosion gully research is one of the important parts of soil erosion subject. In this paper, based on the Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System, taking Kebai area as a case study, using density of erosion gully as the main indicator, the authors analyzed the dynamic change of the erosion gully density, the variation of the erosion gully on different altitudes, slopes and aspects, as well as the variation in different morphogenetic regions, and finally revealed the rule of temporal and spatial variations of erosion gullies in recent 50 years in typical black soil area of Northeast China.
The important journals of 21 kinds about physical geography, which are covered by SCI, are introduced, including the information about the journal names in English and in Chinese, the cycles of issues, the numbers of original edition, the new impact factors, the numbers of international standard edition, the issue places, the issue presses, the connecting address, the new URL, and the brief introduction to each journal. And the brief introduction consists of the year of establishing the journal, the development of the journal, the main topics and languages, the contents of the journal and the abstracts, as well as the articles.
