Based on the multi-regional input-output theory, this paper improves four traditional input-output formulas about exports resulting in multi-regional carbon emissions spatial effects which include direct effect, indirect effect, spillover effect and feedback effect. And the latter two formulas are to measure the bidirectional influences of carbon emissions induced by regional exports between two regions. The results suggest that the direct effects of China's eight regions induced by national exports decreased from 1997 to 2007, and the indirect effects induced by national exports also decreased in most parts of China except the northern coastal and northwestern parts. During this period, most of China's coastal regions had strong spillover effects generated by their exports. The northern coastal and eastern coastal regions had stronger feedback effects, while the southern coastal region had weaker feedback effects and Beijing-Tianjin region had the weakest feedback effect brought by their exports respectively. All of the inland regions had strong feedback effects, especially for the northwest and central China due to their exports. More attention should be paid to inter-regional joint implementation so as to effectively achieve China's national carbon-reduction target.
This paper defines energy output and input provinces in China, and adopts DEA method to measure economic and environmental performance of energy consumption and energy saving potential for the energy output and input provinces from 2000 to 2010. The causes and characteristics of energy consumption performance are analyzed. The energy consumption performance of energy output provinces is compared with that of energy input provinces. Then, this paper uses the Malmquist index model to examine the changing trend of economic and environmental performance of energy consumption for the energy output and input provinces from 2000 to 2010. Finally, we discuss the strategies for promoting energy consumption performance of energy output and input provinces. The results show that, energy output provinces failing to reach optimal energy consumption performance are mainly restricted by scale efficiency, while energy input provinces are restricted by scale efficiency and pure technological efficiency. Energy consumption economic performance improvement of energy output provinces lags behind that of energy input provinces, but energy consumption environmental performance improvement of energy output provinces is better than that of energy input provinces. Technological progress is key to a changing trend of energy consumption performance. Half of the energy output provinces and most of the energy input provinces have input redundancy, and the input redundancy based on environmental output is much higher than that based on economic output, especially for the energy input provinces.
Carbon dioxide emissions of tourism, as an important study issue in tourism industry in the 21st century, is a vital index reflecting its effects on environment change. It is difficult to measure the emissions of regional tourism. The article, taking Jiangsu province as a case, based on the input-output tables and tourism expenditures of 1997, 2002 and 2007, makes an analysis of the direct emissions and indirect emissions of tourism from food, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing, shopping, entertainment and postal services, and then explores the mechanism of influencing factors by Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index. The results are as follows: The total emissions of tourism industry in Jiangsu province in 1997, 2002 and 2007 were 22.57267 Mt, 33.90042 Mt and 62.43800 Mt, respectively, and the annual rate of growth was 10.71%. The indirect emissions account for about 73% of the total emissions. These percentages of food, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing, shopping and entertainment of total emissions in Jiangsu province are comparatively balanced, which, to some extent, reflects the character that the percentage of emissions from tourism sightseeing in China is higher than that of global level and national levels. The total emissions of domestic tourists are evidently higher than those of inbound tourists; however, the per-trip emissions of the inbound tourists are 4-7 times more than those of domestic tourists. There are significant differences of total emissions and per capita emissions among the cities within the province. Among the five factors affecting emissions of tourism industry, the increase of industry size and expenditure size are generally found to be principal drivers of emission growth, whereas the main factors restricting emissions are the decrease of energy intensity and the change of energy share. In addition, the effect of consumption structure shows fluctuation in different stages. These results imply the emission reduction of tourism industry not only needs the share responsibility from all tourism sectors but also strongly relies on the cooperation with related industries, which offer the intermediate goods for the consuming of tourism. Domestic tourists are the main carbon source, but still require more emission space due to low per capita emissions. The cities with higher per capita emissions should bear more obligation of emission reduction. Finally, it should be the main direction of emission reduction to reduce energy use intensity and develop low-carbon tourism behavior.
Economic geography, as one of the most important branches of human geography, is a discipline of studying the space of economic activities. Entering the 21st century, economic geographers in various countries reviewed the developments of domestic economic geography, and forecasted the future research. China's economic geography has been driven by real-world questions, and practice-oriented studies, and is becoming internationalized. It is timely to reflect on achievements, the development processes and characteristics of China's economic geography, which is a precondition to further promote its development. After discussing academic function and social function of economic geography research, this article depicted the developments of economic geography research in China since 1994 from the terms of research teams, research focus and research directions, and revealed the basic drivers of the evolution of China's economic geography. The keywords co-occurrence analysis showed that China's economic geography research was problem-solving oriented, and promptly responded to the policy needs of the development of Chinese regions. The collaboration network of the most productive authors indicated that economic geography research and urban geography research have influenced and learned from each other, and several loosely linked research teams emerged. The analysis on the SSCI-listed economic geography articles written by overseas and indigenous scholars revealed that although the highly cited papers were dominated by overseas Chinese, indigenous scholars also made important contributions to theoretical development of this research field. Based on the quantitative analysis and expert consultation, the article summarized the development trends of the branches of China's economic geography research, including regional differences, industrial agglomeration, spatial link, location theory and industrial layout, transportation geography, producer services, functional zoning, typical area planning, energy and carbon emissions, international trade and FDI, information technology and the Internet. Finally, this paper strongly argued that four relations need to be properly handled in the future for the promotion of economic geography in China.
This paper introduces the "life quality theory". Based on the two-way interactive mechanism between space of rural settlements and the life quality, the paper researches the optimization mode of spatial organization of rural settlements in three aspects, which are the integration of rural settlement spatial functions, the optimization of spatial structure and the regulation of spatial scale, so as to build optimization mode and framework of spatial organization of rural settlements with high quality life. The study suggests that: (1) The settlement is the spatial carrier of life quality and the life quality is the essential content of settlements. The two mentioned above influence and improve each other. So, the reasonable rural settlement space is the important precondition for higher life quality. (2) The type of spatial function of rural settlements can be divided into livelihood maintaining, industrial developing and quality optimizing, and the optimization of spatial organization of rural settlements oriented by life quality requires promotion of livelihood maintaining, integration of industrial developing and engagement of quality optimizing. (3) There are two important aspects in the optimization of spatial organization of rural settlements. The one is to promote the organic concentration of living space, agricultural space and industrial space, the organic evacuation of social intercourse space, recreational space and services space, and the organic balance of living space, production space and ecological space, in order to realize the reasonable proportion and optimized combination of internal spatial type in settlements. And the other one is to form a functional structure level of "comprehensive village - featured village" and build spatial organization mode of settlements connected by rural roads by switching the location and adjusting the function, with the destruction of underdeveloped villages, the saving of normal villages, the enlargement of important villages, and the construction of new villages. (4) As an ideal mode of rural settlements space optimization oriented by life quality, RROD mode should be built at a rational scale of unit settlement and distance between settlements, leading to an RROD and RROD system with rational structure, auxiliary facility, fully function and well-organized distribution.
China has been experiencing unprecedented urbanization process. In 2011, China's urban population reached 691 million with an urbanization rate of 51.27%. Urbanization level is expected to increase to 70% in China in 2030, reflecting the projection that nearly 300 million people would migrate from rural areas to urban areas over this period. At the same time, the natural growth rate of China's population is declining due to the combined effect of economic growth, improvement in education quality, and modern social consciousness. As a result, Chinese government has loosened its "one-child policy" gradually by allowing childbearing couples to have a second child if either of them is from a one-child family. An accurate prediction of the future spatial pattern of population and its evolution is critical for a variety of key policy-making processes in China, such as industrial development, ecological conservation, industrial upgrading and transfer, and environmental protection. In this paper, a top-down method was developed to project the spatial distribution of China's future population with considerations of both natural population growth at provincial level and the population migration between provinces from 2010 to 2050. The results suggested that the overall spatial pattern of Chinese population is unlikely to change significantly over the next four decades. Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Jiangsu will remain the top 4 provinces in terms of population density in China, and Xinjiang, Qinghai and Tibet continue to have the lowest density of population. China's population is projected to continue to concentrate in eastern coastal provinces. Population densities of Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang will peak in 2030, while that of Guangdong will keep increasing until 2035. Due to the large amount of moving-out labors and gradually declining fertility rates, population densities for Central and Northeast China will decrease from 292 persons per km2 in 2010 to 253 persons per km2 in 2050, exhibiting a downward trend. The majority of the western provinces, including Shaanxi, Chongqing, Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Tibet, Guangxi and Inner Mongolia are likely to remain sparsely populated, with an averaged population density no more than 100 persons per km2.
This study mainly aims to explore the spatio-temporal patterns and to simulate the future scenario of population change in Beijing based on the fifth and sixth census data at township level. The main contents and results were summed up as follows: (1) The resident population of Beijing increased with an average annual rate of 3.5% between 2000 and 2010, and the population increased by 0.6 million every year. Beijing was one of the megacities which were classified into the first range for their great amount of increased population. (2) There was an obvious circle structure in space. The population of inner city was almost stagnant; it had a rapid growth in the suburbs, and a high rate in the outer city. However, it had an increase only in the county seat and the key towns in the ecological conservation region of Beijing. (3) In terms of the CA/MAS scenario simulation analysis, in the spontaneous layout scenario, employment opportunities will be further agglomerated to the inner city, while population is suburbanized constantly. This will increase the city's commuter stress and aggravate the condition of city traffic block. When adjusting the parameters of employment and thus strengthening the guide policy of urban population living in working function, the problem of imbalance between industrial space and residential space in the urban internal space scale can be solved. At the same time, the formation of cluster of small towns can be promoted and urban commuter pressure can be reduced. Then comes the city’s radiation and diffusion effect. The authors suggest that, in order to optimize the spatial distribution of population in Beijing, more efforts should be made to coordinate the relationship between employment and residents. An important way is to accelerate regional coordinated development, and to plan multi-centers development as groups.
Before the emergence of modern transport modes, the traditional road infrastructure and road transport (carriage) was a widely used land transport mode, and became a major approach to complete the nationwide social and economic exchanges throughout all historical periods. But the long-term evolution of transport infrastructure is an important studying topic, which has received little research attention. Under this background, this paper, choosing the national road as the studying subject, and taking 3500 years from 1600 BC to 1900 AD as the studying period and designing the model of shortest distance path, aims to examine the developing regularities of traditional road network in a long-term dimension, involving the expansion of spatial network, network structure and accessibility, and developing dynamics. Our analysis reveals long-term regularities: the continuously expanding road network, which experiences four phases with different developing features and spatial pattern, follows a path of inland expansion especially to border areas and brings the peripheral region much closer to the core area of China's homeland, but its coverage and accessibility is characterized by 'concentric rings' and 'core-peripheral' configuration, and the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River has been the core region. The development and evolution of traditional road network has close relationship with the national defense and warfare, centralization of national power around the capital, homeland governance, the postal transport, and specialized cargo and trade transport. This research pays attention to a long-term pattern and attempts to fill the gap of extant literatures, to deeply and better understand the evolving regularities of transport infrastructure network and China's homeland development.
Nansha Islands are located in the south of South China Sea. The islands and coral reefs are scattered in the sea area. Area and other natural conditions of these islands are not the factors limiting intensive human activities, only if there are continued supplies from the mainland. But the supplies shipping to Nansha islands dotted in "Dangerous Area" are not easy jobs. At present, many islands, cays and reefs of Nansha Islands have been invaded and occupied by Vietnam, Philippines and Malaysia. The control states generated by these islands and reefs will affect the ships passing by. Considering the complex situation of Nansha, an accessibility index based on the least accumulative cost distance is proposed. The accessibility model of Nansha Islands and surrounding seaports is established based on the index. Two scenes of natural situation and control states are simulated to calculate the average access times between 23 islands or cays of Nansha and 9 surrounding seaports belong to the 4 countries. The result shows that the control states of islands have a great impact on the accessibility; as the main island of Nansha, Taiping Island gets the optimal accessibility to other islands or cays, which is very suitable to be built as the supply base; Seaports of Vietnam, Malaysia and Philippines get the optimal accessibility to the islands or cays in Nansha, therefore their control abilities to Nansha Islands are very strong and cannot be ignored. However, our seaports get the worst accessibility, so it is our top priority to set frontier supply bases on suitable islands, cays or reefs in Nansha so as to loosen the stress from surrounding countries. In current situation, Zhubi Jiao and Yongshu Jiao are the suitable options to be built as supply and transit bases for China. This research can be a reference for the development and management of Nansha Islands or decision-making of marine development.
A review of progress in cultural geography in mainland of China during the past ten years needs to be discussed. This paper constructs an analysis system which recent research projects and publications relate to. Some articles reviewed the research of cultural geography by Chinese scholars based on the view angle of five themes in traditional cultural geography. However, they did not tell the logical relation between key concepts and theories. The method of this paper is constructivism. It takes references to build up a "genealogy tree" of cultural geography. The main object in geography is "place and region". Cultural geography seeks to analyze the mechanism of place from the perspective of culture. This is the trunk of the "genealogy tree". "Relationships between layers" and "scaling of place" are two branches of this tree. They are two methods to explore place. This paper also puts main concepts and theories to the "tree". The three conclusions are as follows. The first is that many case studies done by Chinese cultural geographers are on mechanism of place making. Most are based on the methodology of structuralism. The second is that the major development by Chinese cultural geographers is increasing the volume of case studies which refer to interaction between different layers of cultural system, which do not only refer to nature-society nexus. The third is about scale conversion issues of cultural areas. Chinese cultural geographers have started to pay attention to this poorly developed theme.
Since the implementation of reform and opening up policy, with the prosperous economy, more and more overseas immigrants, especially high-skilled expatriates from developed countries, have come to China fighting for their "Chinese Dream", which has exerted a subtle influence on the economy, society, space and landscape of the host city. This paper intends to examine the ethnic economy Japanese expatriates developed, by means of on-the-spot investigation, questionnaire survey, in-depth interview and so on. For one thing, it sheds light on the quantity and size of the ethnic economy. For another, trying to find out its distribution in industry, space and some special industry chains is also an important content of the paper. By some case studies, this paper tries to reveal the economic situation and its influence on foreign immigrants in Chinese cities in the new era. The study shows that, with some complete industry chains, the ethnic economy can be characterized as high-end, wider coverage, self-serving and rooted in local areas. Japanese expatriates in Guangzhou rely extremely on it for their daily needs and they appear to be isolated from the local society. Actually, ethnic economy not only serves Japanese's daily needs, but also has become a tool for Japanese to maintain their identity, which has promoted the growth of expatriate CBD in Guangzhou. These changes have brought about new topics for the internationalization of cities and the managements and services for immigrants.
With the growing mismatch between transport supply and demand in urban China, the analysis, forecasting and guidance of travel demand in a scientific and effective way has become a vital question for the sustainability of urban development. In western countries, the research of travel demand has developed from a trip-based perspective towards an activity-based perspective, and the analysis of the in-home and out-of-home activity participation, which is believed to be closely related to travel demand by many scholars, has provided significant implications for the research of travel demand. In China, however, there are few studies on the mechanism of travel demand from the perspective of in-home and out-of-home activity participation. Based on the first-hand data collected in the Beijing Residents' Activity and Travel Survey in 2012, this paper looked into the time allocation of in-home and out-of-home non-work activities of urban residents with an activity-based analysis of 460 respondents from the Shangdi-Qinghe area in Beijing, and thus tried to interpret the mechanism of the non-work travel demand of urban residents from an activity-based perspective. A series of structural equation models were applied to explore the determination of whether a non-work activity was pursued at home or away from home. The result of the models showed a high degree of good-of-fit. There were several main findings of the research: Firstly, there were significant differences between the duration of the in-home activities and that of the out-of-home activities. Secondly, there was a significant substitution between in-home and out-of-home activities. Thirdly, the time allocation of in-home and out-of-home non-work activities was affected by the work and commute duration and the socio-demographic characteristics, and there were endogenous links among different types of non-work activities. The result of this study may provide good implications for the modelling and influence of residents' travel demand.
