In November, 2014, Premier Li Keqiang raised a problem about Hu Huanyong population line (hereinafter referred to as "Hu line"), when visiting the exhibition of sciences of human settlements in National Museum of China, which was called "Premier's Question" by the press. Hence, Hu line has become a highlight currently, and aroused great controversy and different views. Aiming at such dilemma of cognition, this paper gives a general review of the origins of Hu line, which was put forward by the famous population geographer Hu Huanyong in 1935, under the background of a debate on the surplus of domestic population. Based on population census data and GIS platform, the paper analyzes the change of population scale, proportion and density in both southeast and northwest sides of Hu line. The results indicate that the population urbanization and migration do not change the pattern of population distribution determined by Hu line. On such basis, the pattern that the population density of southeast part is large, while that of northwest part is relatively small will not radically change over a longer period, and the pattern that urban agglomeration is mainly located in southeast part as well. The long-term existence of Hu line depends on integrated physical geographical conditions, like climate. At the meantime, this paper argues that the core issue of the Premier's concern is solvable, by positive policy guidance and reasonable spatial organization. It is definitely promising for western China to realize a higher level of modernization and a better quality of urbanization, and central region as well.

New urbanization is one of China's key national policies. Scientific evaluation focusing upon the human being is the necessary basis of understanding China's recent urbanization and then developing the right policies. There are currently two main evaluation methods of urbanization: the proportion of urban population in a given country or region, and the development of cities and towns in a given region, which are based on the urban-rural dual system. These two methods have deeply reflected the economic and spatial changes than the social restructuring in the course of urbanization, which means the human being as the core of urbanization, particularly those living in the countryside, has not been paid enough attention. Based on the interaction between people's daily activities and urban environment, this paper established a new evaluation system of the population's urbanization quality with 7 modern life indexes, and analyzed the urbanization quality of the urban, rural and the total population at the two levels of the state and 31 provinces. The main findings are: (1) As a social restructuring process, urbanization has not only taken place in the cities and towns, although the urbanization speed in the urban areas is more faster than that in the rural areas. The urbanization quality of both urban and rural population has improved at state and provincial levels since 1995. (2) Two different urbanization spatial patterns of the urban and rural population have formed during the past two decades. The urban population has changed from a low level balance before 1995 to the rise of some provinces in 2000, to the dual structure of East and West in 2005, to the trichotomy of Eastern-Central-Western China after 2010, which is evolving to a higher balanced situation; While the urbanization of rural population has changed from a low level balance before 1995 to the two gradient patterns of Coastal East and Inland Middle and West in recently years. (3) The urbanization quality indexes of rural population in Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang Province have exceeded those of urban population in some inland lower urbanized provinces such as Jiangxi, Guizhou, Qinghai and Tibet, which indicates that the urbanization of rural population in the coastal areas is well developed compared with some inland urban areas. So this paper suggests that the evaluation ways and standard of urbanization should be changed, the institutional system of dual urban-rural system should be modified, in order to meet the demand of China's objective need of urbanization.

Population migration flows between different regions are related to not only the origin- and destination-specific characteristics, but also to the migration flows to and from neighborhoods. Intuitively, changes in the characteristics of a single region will impact both inflows and outflows to and from other regions. In order to explore the spatial interaction mechanism driving the increasing population migration in China, this paper builds the spatial OD model of interprovincial migration flows based on the sixth national population census data and related social-economic data. The findings are as follows: (1) Migration flows show significant autocorrelation effects among origin and destination regions, which means that the migration behavior of migrants in some region is influenced by that of migrants in other places. The positive effects indicate the outflows from an origin or the inflows to a destination tend to cluster in a similar way. Simultaneously, the negative effects suggest the flows from the neighborhood of an origin to the neighborhood of a destination tend to disperse in a dissimilar way. (2) Multilateral effects of the regional economic and social factors through the spatial network system lead to the clustering migration flows across interrelated regions. Distance decay effect plays the most influential force in shaping the patterns of migration flows among all the factors and the negative spillover effect further aggravates the friction of distance. As for destinations, the influence of wage level and migration stocks is beyond that of GDP and the positive spillover effects of these factors enhance the attraction of neighborhood regions. The spillover effects of unemployment rate and college enrollment of higher education are significantly negative while the effect of population in a destination is not significant. As for origins, population and migration stocks lead to positive spillover effects on the neighborhoods while the effects of other factors are negative. (3) Changes in the regional characteristics will potentially lead to a series of events to the whole migration system, and the flows to and from the center of oscillation and its neighborhoods vibrate greatly compared with other regions. The simulation results of 5% GDP increase in Jiangsu province indicate that the outflows to other regions decrease while the inflows from all others increase to some different extent. Comparatively, the influence on the flows to and from the regions neighboring Jiangsu is significant while that of remote regions is much less, which cannot be explained by the traditional gravity model.

Political geography is an important sub-discipline of human geography. However, existing literature demonstrates that the political geography of China, especially research by indigenous scholars, has not been well represented in the discipline in general, including in international journals. Based on a systematic analysis of journal papers published in the key journal Political Geography over the last decade, this article considers the potential of political geographical research both of and in China. In so doing, this article foregrounds an overview of 391 journal papers published from 2005 to 2015 in Political Geography, through which it concludes that the main themes of these papers can be generalized into six categories: borderlands and boundaries, environmental and climate politics, space and scale, security issues, electoral geography, and social and cultural politics. Among these, space and scale, security issues, and social and cultural politics have usually been understood as comprising the mainstream of political geography, while the others have been viewed as more subsidiary topics. Moreover, this article investigates the methods applied in the papers analyzed, among which qualitative analyses, especially ethnography and textual analysis, are identified as the leading methods, while the use of quantitative analysis has, to a certain extent, been criticized for its limitations. Finally, this article identifies the academic hegemony of developed countries in the Global North, especially the UK and the US, which have long held supremacy in international academia in general. A thorough examination of the research subjects and research institutions of the sampled papers shows that this trend is also reflected in international political geography research. This academic hegemony strongly correlates with the discrepancy between the Global North and the Global South. China's augmenting national power, increasing participation in international affairs, and status as a new emerging geopolitical power mean that there is an urgent need to realize the applicability of political geography to policy making in the Chinese context.