The comprehensive regionalization of Chinese human geography is based on the rules governing regional differentiation of Chinese physical geography factors. Based on regional differences and similarities in human factors, this study divides the whole country into two levels of relatively independent, complete and organically linked human geographic units. As a fundamental, comprehensive, cutting-edge, practical and important task, the comprehensive regionalization of human geography highlights the characteristics, regional and sub-regional features, complexity and variety of spatial differences between factors of Chinese human geography. It is capable of promoting the development of human geography based on local conditions, providing basic scientific support to national and local development strategies, such as the Belt and Road Strategy, new urbanization and environmental awareness, and creating a sound geopolitical environment in key areas. Using results from existing physical and human geography zoning studies, and in accordance with the principles of synthesis, dominant factors, the relative consistency of the natural environment, the relative consistency of economic and social development, the consistency of the regional cultural landscape, the continuity of spatial distribution and the integrity of county-level administrative divisions, and taking as its basis the division of human geography into 10 major factors (natural condition, the economy, population, culture, ethnicity, agriculture, transportation, urbanization, the settlement landscape and administrative divisions), this paper constructs an index system for the comprehensive regionalization of Chinese human geography through a combination of top-down and bottom-up zoning and spatial clustering analysis. In this study, Chinese human geography is divided into eight regions (first level) and 66 sub-regions (second level). The eight human geography regions are (I) Northeast China, (II) North China, (III) East China, (IV) Central China, (V) South China, (VI) Northwest China, (VII) Southwest China, and (VIII) Qinghai and Tibet. This zoning proposal fills gaps in studies involving the non-comprehensive regionalization of Chinese human geography. Each human geography region and sub-region has different topographical, climatic, ecological, population, urbanization, economic development, settlement landscape, regional cultural and ethno-religious attributes. This proposal on the comprehensive regionalization of Chinese human geography dovetails closely with previous studies on comprehensive regionalization in Chinese physical geography, Chinese economic zoning, and Chinese agriculture zoning. It shows that, under the dual roles of nature and humans, there are certain rules of regional differentiation that govern the comprehensive regionalization of Chinese human geography.
With the implementation and deepening of household registration reform and liberalizing of factors flow under market economy system, the imbalance in regional development is becoming increasingly complex. Thus it is significant to conduct research on the impact of population flow on regional economic disparities. This paper selected the Yangtze River economic belt as a case study, and used population flow ratio (to divide the difference between resident population and registered population by resident population) to represent the migration size. Based on the county-level data of registered population and resident population in China's fourth, fifth and sixth censuses, we analyzed the spatial-temporal patterns of economic disparities and population flow, and explored population mobility effect on economic inequalities in the Yangtze River economic belt. With the Theil index, spatial analysis and regression modeling methods, the following conclusions could be drawn: (1) The economic disparities based on resident population were smaller than those besed on registered population. The former was shrinking with the elapse of time, while the latter was expanding. (2) The eastern zone showed the megalopolis characteristic and a center-periphery spatial economic structure, with the spatial aggregation of developed counties in the Yangtze River Delta as the planar core area, while there were several sub-center-periphery structures with center city as point core area in the central and western zones. (3) The impact of population flow on economic growth was significantly different between inflow and outflow counties. The increase of population flow rate promoted the economic growth of inflow areas remarkably in 2000 and 2010. While it retarded the economic growth of outflow areas in 2000, and enhanced it slowly in 2010. The county economic gaps in the Yangtze River economic belt was widening. (4) The impact of population flow on regional economy disparities was prominently weakened with the provincial and regional factors taken into account. (5) Population flow was the most prominent factor which affects the regional economic disparities, followed by economic structure embodied in the level of industrialization. The other factors were human capital, fiscal decentralization and regional strategy. Emphasizing labor return, promoting family migration and speeding up industrialization are key policies to prevent and even narrow the regional economic gaps in outflow areas.
Scaling laws are powerful reflectors of the variations of the output of urban economic activities and the number of infrastructures with urban population. However, the difference in spatial definition of cities and data sources by countries leads to different statistical results of scaling law. We aim to analyse the difference in this paper by calculating regression coefficients of scaling law at different spatial scales, combined with census data, urban statistical yearbook data and remote sensing data of China. The conclusions are shown as follows: (1) Scaling coefficients change with both spatial scales and data sources. For spatial scales, scaling law is more agreeable with the data of urban municipal districts than with those of the whole city area in China. As there is a large number of non-urbanized areas within cities; these regions do not meet the assumptions of scaling law model. For data source, remote sensing data have a better fitting result than urban statistical yearbook data. (2) Comparatively speaking, urban population agglomeration contributes more to economic growth in China than it does in the US, but China has lower energy consumption and land-use efficiency. For example, the Gross Regional Product (GRP) scaling indicator of China is 1.22, while it is 1.11 in the United States. (3) Population agglomeration contributes more to the economic growth in large cities than in small cities. This may explain the emerging trends of urban immigrants in large cities of China. However, for energy consumption, small and medium-sized cities are more efficient than large cities. In addition, this paper discusses the potential direction for urban scaling research from three aspects: establishing more effective statistical units, combining traditional survey with big data analysis, and exploring mechanics behind scaling models.
The multi-level perspective and multi-scalar city network have gradually become the critical pathways to understand spatial interactions and linkages. The road linkages represent distinguished characteristics of spatial dependence and distance decay, which is of great significance in depicting spatial relationships at regional scale. Based on the data of highway passenger flows between prefecture-level administrative units, this paper tries to identify the functional structures and regional impacts of China's city network, and further explores the spatial organization patterns of the existing functional regions, aiming to deepen the understanding of city network structure and provide new cognitive perspectives for the extant research. The empirical results are shown as follows: (1) It is immediately visible that the highway flows are extremely concentrated on the mega-regions of eastern coastal China and major economic zones in central and western China. And city networks based on highway flows demonstrate strong spatial dependence and hierarchical characteristics, which to a large extent has spatial coupling with the distributions of major mega-regions in China. It is a reflection of spatial relationships at regional scale and core-periphery structure. (2) A total of 19 communities that belong to important spatial configurations are identified through community detection algorithm, and we believe that they are urban economic regions within urban China. Their spatial metaphors can be concluded in three aspects. Firstly, many communities have the same boundaries with provincial level administrative units, which reveals that significant administrative region economy still exists in contemporary China. Secondly, trans-provincial linkages can be formed through spatial spillover effects of mega-regions within specific communities. Thirdly, cities located in the marginal areas of provinces and attracted by powerful center cities in neighboring provinces may become increasingly disconnected with their own provinces and be enrolled into communities of neighboring provinces, which make contribution to the formation of the trans-provincial core-periphery structures. (3) Each community, with its distinguished city network system, demonstrates strong spatial dependence and various spatial organization patterns. Regional patterns have emerged with the features of a multi-level, dynamic and networked system. (4) From the morphology perspective, the spatial pattern of regional city networks can be basically divided into monocentric structure, dual-nuclei structure, polycentric structure and low-level equilibration structure, with the monocentric structure as the major type.
To enhance tourism competitiveness is the core objective of the construction of a smart tourism city. On the basis of the previous studies, the research builds an index system on the tourism competitiveness evaluation of smart tourism city, including 5 indexes of first grade, 14 of second grade and 33 of third grade, selects the first 12 pilot cities of national smart tourism such as Beijing, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Dalian and Xiamen, constructs the BP neural network model of tourism competitiveness evaluation of smart tourism city through the simulation computation, and applies the model to evaluate and analyze the tourism competitiveness of the smart tourism cities mentioned above. The results indicated that the scientific and technological innovation of the smart tourism city is the most important first grade index which impacts the tourism competitiveness. The other first grade indexes are economic development of smart tourism city, support capability of tourism development, tourism development potentiality and environmental support capability ranked according to their importance; the overall level of tourism competitiveness of Chinese smart tourism cities is not high and extremely uneven and the smart tourism cities are divided into five categories according to their own evaluation level and competition situation. The first category includes Beijing, which is the benchmark of tourism competitiveness of Chinese smart tourism cities. All the five first grade indexes of Beijing run ahead of other smart tourism cities. Its comprehensively-evaluated value reaches 0.887, rated AA level, and its competition situation is superior. The second category includes Nanjing, whose evaluation value of the environmental support capability of smart tourism city is tied for the first place with Beijing. Its evaluation values of economic development power, scientific and technological innovation, and support capability of development are all ranked 2nd. The comprehensively-evaluated value of Nanjing is 0.536, rated BB level, which is significantly higher than that of other smart tourism cities except Beijing and its competition situation is better. The third category cities, including Wuhan, Dalian, Chengdu, Wenzhou, Xiamen, Zhenjiang and Yantai, are representatives of the present general level of tourism competitiveness of Chinese smart tourism cities, whose 5 first grade index values are all low and there are no remarkable gaps between them. Their comprehensively-evaluated values are between 0.3 and 0.4, rated B level and their competition situation is on the average. The fourth category includes Fuzhou and Luoyang, the vast majority of its first index values are lower. Their comprehensively-evaluated values are between 0.2 and 0.3, rated CC level and their competition situation is weak. The fifth category includes Huangshan, whose comprehensively-evaluated value is just 0.176, rated C level and its competition situation is weaker. The BP neural network model of tourism competitiveness evaluation of smart tourism city is of better scientificity, universality and operability. Judging the tourism competitiveness of smart tourism cities according to their evaluation values, comparing it with the index system to find and bridge the gaps, and monitoring the evaluation index dynamically will be an important direction of tourism competitiveness research of smart tourism cities.
School districting has been widely introduced for compulsory education in urban areas of China in recent years according to the national policy of nearby school enrollment. A new enrollment policy for compulsory schools was issued by the Ministry of Education of China in 2016. According to the policy, a new school districting scheme for a district consisting of multiple schools is recommended to cities with uneven provision of compulsory schools, which aims to stabilize the apartment price in some existing school districts, and also to appease the public criticism on the phenomenon of school choice. This paper proposes a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm for solving both the classical single-school and the new multi-school districting problems. A two-stage strategy of "school grouping first and student assigning second" was used for multi-school districting. The school grouping problem was solved by mixed linear programming. An algorithm of multi-start iterated local search (ILS) with set-partitioning modeling (M-ILS-SPP) was introduced to solve the student assigning problem, which is a difficult problem due to the constraints of district contiguity and school capacity. Each run of ILS starts with an initial solution generated by the region growth method, and then executes neighborhood search and ruin-and-recreate perturbation iteratively. The proposed algorithm adopted four neighborhood search operators, three ruin methods and two solution acceptance rules. In addition, a model of set-partitioning problem (SPP) was used to choose a better solution from the historical districts identified by ILS. Two cases were used to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results from multiple scenarios of school districting show that the M-ILS-SPP algorithm for single-school or multi-school districting problems is effective in terms of solution quality and algorithm convergence. It is also found that the newly-designed neighborhood operators which move more spatial units simultaneously and the use of three perturbation methods randomly are critical for finding high quality district solutions. In addition, the set-partitioning modeling overcomes the short-sight limitation of local search operators and is capable of finding globally best solutions, especially for the single-school districting problem.
China lags behind most of the developed countries in regional specialization of agricultural production. This backwardness has weakened its competitiveness of agricultural products in world market. It is generally recognized that household farmland area has been the key limiting factor, but it stemmed from qualitative analyses or experiences and lacked supports of empirical analyses. In this paper, we examined the relationship between household farmland area (HFA) and regional specialization at provincial level based on the specialization index of Hirschman-Herfindahl (SHHI) and agricultural statistical data. The data included planting area of crops and per capita area of land managed by households. The results suggested that enlargement of HFA was neither a sufficient condition nor even a necessary one for regional specialization. But it helped. In spatial dimension, the provinces with larger HFA were not at a higher level of specialization inevitably. The rank correlation coefficients between HFA and SHHI were not significant in the period from 2002 to 2012. In temporal dimension, SHHI did not increase or decrease with the HFA in most of the sample provinces. There were only 12 of the 29 sample provinces whose SHHI correlated significantly with HFA. The 12 provinces were those where major crops were more land-intensive. These results implied that enlargement of household farmland area can not improve regional specialization inevitably in China. There is a need for other effective ways to enforce China's regional specialization of agricultural production.
Field investigations were carried out along the upper reaches of the Hanjiang River, a major tributary of the Yangtze River in China. Three loess profiles on the first river terrace were selected for a detailed study. The characteristics of major elements and chemical weathering were analyzed systematically. Results are shown as follows. (1) The major elements are dominated by SiO2, Al2O3 and Fe2O3, the total average content of which is 767. 3 g/kg, in the loess profiles of the region. The contents of the major elements are ranked in the following order: SiO2>Al2O3>Fe2O3>K2O>MgO>Na2O>CaO. The elements Na, Ca, Mg and Si are leached to different degrees and Fe, Al and K relatively enriched in the chemical weathering processes. (2) The weathering and pedogenic intensity was the weakest in the Malan loess L1, increased slightly in the transition loess Lt, became the strongest in the paleosol S0, and decreased again in recent loess L0. The results reveal that the climate was cold-dry in the Last Glacial (55.0-15.0 ka BP), turned into warm-wet gradually in the Early Holocene (15.0-8.5 ka BP), became the warmest and wettest in the Mid-Holocene Climate Optimum (8.5-3.1 ka BP), and turned into cool and dry in the Late Holocene (3.1-0.0 ka BP). (3) Based on the comparison with Luochuan, Wushan and Xiashu loess, we can find that the major elemental compositions and the UCC-normalized patterns of the loess are similar with those of Luochuan, Wushan and Xiashu loess to a higher degree, suggesting a similar sedimentary background of aeolian loess. But the chemical weathering intensity of these loess deposits changes significantly in different parts of China, with the sequence?of Luochuan loess < loess in the Hanjiang River < Wushan loess
With the environmental problems becoming increasingly serious, the urgency of the air pollution control has attracted the attention of the Chinese government. Due to the unique natural conditions and industrial structure across different provinces, the central government should make endeavors to figure out the problems of emission reduction responsibilities. Actually, the spatial transfer of PM2.5 emissions embodied between the producer and the consumer in the production of consumable items through trade flows has the ability to undermine future climate and environmental policies. Based on the MRIO tables in 2007 and 2010, this article calculated PM2.5 embodied in interprovincial trade, and explored the corresponding spatial transfer characteristics of PM2.5 embodied emissions. The results showed that, PM2.5 emissions embodied in interprovincial trade (EEPT) approximately accounted for 1/3 of the country's total amount, and more importantly, the EEPT decreased significantly since the economic crisis in 2008, though the ratio between the PM2.5 EEPT and the production-based PM2.5 emissions increased to some extent. Moreover, PM2.5 emissions embodied in provincial export trade (EEPE) of the eastern provinces are mostly made up by final consumption, while the EEPE of the central, western and northeastern provinces are mainly composed of the intermediate input production. Therefore, in terms of the controlling on the PM2.5 EEPE, the eastern provinces should pay more attention to the final consumption, and the other provinces should focus on the intermediate input production. From the perspective of the production chain in China, PM2.5 emissions embodied in interprovincial import trade is primarily dominated by the intermediate input, which means that the regional corporation on the environment may be necessary for regional environmental policies. Furthermore, for the central, western and northeastern provinces, the proportion of the EEPT reduced by fixed capital formation is higher than that of the eastern provinces. Therefore, for these industries, the EEPT with the highest emissions such as the construction, the machinery, and other services should receive more attention in the pollution control policy. Considering the balance of the EEPT, the eastern provinces are net importers except for Hebei and Shandong, while the central, western and northeastern provinces are net exporters. In other words, the EEPT is transferred from the central, western and northeastern provinces to the eastern ones, which is stable after the economic crisis. Finally, in terms of policy, the eastern provinces should provide financial and technological aid to the provinces where the EEPT is transferred in regional environmental policy.
In order to realize equitable and reasonable utilization of transboundary water, the "Convention of the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses" is the first global legal framework which took more than 40 years to discuss, design, sign and approve, and finally entered into force in 2014. Because the Convention has few signatories, the power of the Convention will be affected because some rules are under dispute. In this paper, the locations of each of the Convention's parties in related international rivers were identified based on the maps of the "Global Transbounary Rivers Basin" published by UNEP in 2016. Combined with available water volumes and withdrawals, the importance of related international rivers and regional cooperation on transboundary water of the parties with their locations on the international rivers, the regional, locational and objective differences among the parties to approve the Convention were analyzed and discovered. Some major conclusions are as follows. (1) Up until now, only 36 states are parties to the Convention, which are located in Asia, Africa and Europe, meaning that the Convention will have limited influence. (2) When the Convention balances the rights and the obligations among the riparian states, it is more beneficial for the downstream states to seek water benefits, so that the downstream states have the strongest motivation to sign and approve the Convention, and the Convention's counterbalance affects the motives of the states on the middle reaches, the frontiers or the tributaries. (3) Under the stress of water shortages and the importance of transboundary waters, the riparian states are seeking ways to strengthen the controlling power on its transboundary waters, and ratifying the Convention is one option. (4) The riparian states' experiences with transboundary water cooperation are the basis to be a party to the Convention, as most of the parties gained experience mainly from water project cooperation, and downstream and midstream parties' experiences are from general framework agreements and water projects cooperation.
Fraud crime is a widespread social problem that should be taken seriously in modern city. Previous studies mainly focused on personal attributes of victims at the micro level from the perspective of sociology, rather than the environmental factors at the macro level from the perspective of geography. Using methods such as average nearest neighbor analysis, kernel density and negative binomial regression, this paper aims to discuss spatial-temporal characteristics of five types of fraud crime in ZG city, and explore the influencing factors of physical and socioeconomic environment based on the perspective of crime geography. The main results are as follows: (1) Each type of fraud crime has its own characteristics of temporal distribution. However, on the whole, fraud crime takes place on workdays more than on weekends, in the afternoon and evening more than in the morning. It reaches the minimum before dawn. (2) Similar to other urban crimes, the spatial distribution of fraud crime reveals significantly polycentric patterns that follow the trend of distance decay, and hot spots of various fraud crimes are mostly alike except minor differences. Diverse fraud crimes are mostly distributed in the old city, CBD, railway stations, bus stations, urban villages, or around colleges and universities. Each type of fraud crime shows different trends of aggregation and dispersion. (3) Different fraud crimes are influenced by disparate factors, but all of them are highly correlated with physical environment, such as bank branches, tourist attractions, road networks, mixed land use and college or university campuses. Moreover, house ownership, education level, age and urbanization level also have significant effects on fraud crime. The study expands the research of fraud crime to the spatial context and proves that fraud crime conforms to the theoretical assumptions of routine activity theory, which could potentially help reduce fraud.
Current theoretical and empirical literature provides abundant knowledge about why and where crime takes place. However, few empirical studies analyze the scale applicability of the existing research. In order to get a better understanding of the relationship between burglary and sociodemographic and economic characteristics, this paper applies multiscale analysis to assess the stability of model parameters on different spatial scales. First, this paper summarizes the existing theories of environmental criminology, and concludes that each kind of theory can only be employed in a certain spatial scale. Thus, a more comprehensive explanation of crime needs more than one crime theory. Geographical factors associated with burglary also distinct between the results from different spatial scales. Therefore, multiscale analysis method may offer a more comprehensive and accurate analysis than single scale analysis in crime modelling. Second, using a recent burglary dataset from N city in southeast China, the current research applies a seemingly unrelated regression model to assess the stability of correlation coefficients between burglary and geographical factors among five spatial scales (residential area, neighborhood, community, street and district). After Wald's test for a significant test of correlation coefficients, the experimental result shows that, some correlation coefficients do not vary, while others vary significantly. Environmental criminology theories at different spatial scales explain the changes of these correlation coefficients. Finally, compared with the inversion results from single spatial scales, those integrating five spatial scales show a higher accuracy. The result demonstrates that, in the research of environmental criminology, the theories, geographical factors and spatial distribution inversion all depend on scale change. Multiscale analysis method performs better in geographical analysis, theory research and crime inversion than single scale analysis.
Burglary and outdoor-theft are two frequently studied types of crime. Yet no comprehensive comparisons between their spatial distributions and associating factors in Chinese cities are available to this day. Therefore, drawing on routine activities theory, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and defensible space, utilizing multi-source heterogeneous spatio-temporal data of ZH peninsula, ZG city in southern China, this study aims to examine the effect of the built environment and social environment of neighborhoods on burglary and outdoor-theft, as well as comparative analysis between the two crime types. Results suggest that there are some regularities in ZH peninsula, which means under the background of built environment, the influences of burglary are relatively concentrated, while the influences of outdoor-theft are more dispersed. There exist some relative commonalities and differences in the fact that the social environment and built environment influence and act on burglary and outdoor-theft. On the one hand, the population density, the proportion of juvenile, the density of bus stops and the distance to the city center what show significant impact on the occurrence of burglary and outdoor-theft. What's more, their directions of forces are consistent. On the other hand, the density of road network, the density of retail business, and the density of catering and accommodation are the dominant factor of outdoor-theft. Meanwhile, the education level of residents is the significant factor of burglary. The extension of the results may well provide references for associated prevention and control specific to burglary and outdoor-theft in the communities.
Theft from person (TFP) is one of the most common crimes in China. It is assumed that TFP is the result of interaction among motivated offenders, suitable targets and guardians. Specific routine activities and places can be important indicators for the TFPs. However, few studies can focus on the time differentiation of relationship between citizens' daily activities and TFPs. This study aims to narrow this gap by uncovering the time relationship between citizens' activities and TFPs, as well as the impacts of specific facilities on TFPs. Using the data of TFPs from the police, the sixth national census, facilities addresses and citizens activities log in a big city in south China, the whole day is divided into four stages (before dawn: 23:00-6:59, morning: 7:00-9:59, daytime: 10:00-17:59, night: 18:00-22:59). Spatial lag negative binomial regression models are built for the four stages accordingly. We find that the spatial and temporal aggregation of TFP is obvious for all the stages. Activities for buying food, shopping and entertainment are positively related to TFP while activity of dining out has no significant relationship with it. Besides, key factors that impact TFP vary from stage to stage. Before dawn, entertainment facilities, restaurants and food markets have positive influence on TFP. In the morning, the existence of food market, bus stations, restaurants and some entertainment facilities (cinema and net-bar) will improve the risks of TFP. In the daytime, subways, shops for daily supplement, some entertainment facilities (cinema, bar and net bar) have positive effect on TFP. At night, subway stations, shops, bars and net bars will increase the risk of TFP. In addition, possibility of combination of time geography and crime geography and its application are discussed in this study.
