工业地理学是经济地理学的一个分支学科,研究工业生产的地域分布及其规律,着重从区域与综合角度,研究各种工业布局的因素与特点和不同类型的工业地域组合(地域工业综合体)的形成、发展与分布规律。

In China, since the founding of the People’s Republic, industrial geography has gradually developed, giving emphasis to serve economic planning and regional development. In the past three decades, its main fields of research were:1.Compiling of monographs chracterized by analysing the process of formation and evolution of industry allocation in China.2.Providing basicin formation and scientific appraisal for planning the future allocation of regional industry.Based on various investigations into the overal allocation of key construction projects in several important industrial bases, mainly in North and East China, a great number of valuable reports were worked out and quite a few important proposals put forward.Among these, reports on the Zibo industrial base and a framework of territorial planning of Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan area are most successful.The former recommended a site for a big petro-chemical complex and the latter made an overall blueprint and a series of suggestions for the future territorial development with industry as the main contents.3. In recent years, economic geographers began to tackle the development stra tegy of industry of China. For example, Lu Da-dao advanced a conception of "Pole-axis growth" as one of the scientific basis for the nation-wide allocation of industry up to 2000. He argued that the coastal belt and both banks of the lower and middle reaches of the Chang-Jiang River are two most important, "growth axes" and a number of cities along or beyond them could be regarded as the growth poles. Li Wen-yan and Chen Hang contributed to theenergy strategy a preliminary study on the energy-economic regionalization of China. They proposed two-order energy-economic regions be delineated through comprehensive appraisal of the regional differentiation on the richness and chracteristics of energy resources and scientific demarcation of the marketing regions of potential energy bases.4. With respect to theoretical study of industrial geography, it is relatively weaker than the applied aspects. In the past decades, main efforts were put on the following themes: (1) Economic appraisal of mineral resources and their territorial combination; (2) Regional industrial system and territorial combination of plants; (3) Factors and conditions relevent to allocation of industry; (4) Basic theory and methodology of industrial geography as a subdisci-pline of economic geography. Up to now, more than 50 papers have been published besides an textbook of industrial geography compiled by Prof. Wei Xing-zhen.To further develop industrial geography in China, the author suggests the following three aspects deserving more efforts from economic geographers:1. Continously serve various kinds of planning, regional planning in particular, emphasising on comprehensive allocation of industry; actively participate in the study of development strategy of industry, nation-wide or regional, overall or sectorial;undertake pre-feasibility studies of some key projects.2. Regional industry should be dealt with as a system, comprising of a set of operating units with the functions of industrial management,production and service.It is necessary to research into the techno-economic linkage of industrial systems and their organizational linkage as well.3. Combine researches on the allocation of industry of China with those of foreign countries.Comparative study could be done further and it is becoming more important to study the impacts of the introduction of foreign invest and technology on the development of regional industrial systems.4. More efforts should be turned to theory and methodology of industrial geography. Relationships between industry and technique, environment, energy, society, government policy, investment and growth of population involved in the allocation deserve much more attention. Systematic analysis could be well introduced to the researches of industrial regions.