This paper focuses on the viewpoint proposed by predecessors of geography and they believed that geography is interdiscipline subject between natural science and social science. From the perspective of national demand and development trend of international geography, this paper explains the objects and nature of geographical science and characters of region as well as comprehensive characteristics and knowledge structure. Besides, it elaborates the differences among geography, natural science and social science and advocates that geographers should concentrate on the China's environmental changes and the issues of sustainable development and further fulfil the advantages of interdiscipline and comprehensive subject. Finally, this paper proposes that China's geographical science is faced with the significant opportunities and some deep-seated crises.
In recent years, the Free Economic Zones (FEZs), as a product of economic globalization and regional economic integration, have become the growth poles of economic development in developing countries, the motivations of urbanization and a significant stage for the reforms of related institutions. In China, there is an urgent need to construct free trade zones in order to meet the new challenges of globalization and international trade structure, to strengthen the reform motivation, and to carry out the national strategies of One Belt and One Road and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration. At present, some experts and scholars scrutinize the rules and factors contributing to FEZs' development based on the qualitative analysis. However, they are still confronted with less research on evolution law in FEZs on account of quantitative research methods. Therefore, this paper applies methodologies such as interview, and questionnaire to collect data based on domestic and overseas theories and case studies about FEZs. It also adopts the analysis of hierarchy process and fuzzy evaluation method, selects seven elements: policies, markets, environments, industries, inputs, benefits and innovativeness, and establishes the index system and evaluation model of FEZs' development evolution mechanism. Finally, with the aid of the model and combined with the actual situation of Tianjin Binhai New Area, the paper analyzes the main driving forces of Tianjin Pilot Free Trade Zone's development dynamic mechanism. This study is an asset to the transformation and development of the FEZs in China as well as further theoretical research in the future.
Factory data from 23 Chinese provinces, combined with Chinese cement manufacturing industry data and socioeconomic data from 2012, was used to analyze the spatial distribution of exergy use for China's cement manufacturing industry using the Extended Exergy Accounting method. This method allows for the inclusion of energy and raw material supply and other external factors (capital, labor and environment) in a comprehensive resource cost assessment. We quantitatively calculated the extended exergy consumption and its intensity at the provincial level and evaluated the agglomeration level of exergy use at the regional level. Based on this analysis, a distribution in size and efficiency of exergy use at the provincial level was determined, and regional characteristics were revealed. The results are as follows. (1) The gross distribution of exergy use in China's cement manufacturing industry is focused on the eastern region, which centers on Anhui and Shandong, and on the western region with Sichuan as a core. For exergy use, energy costs related to coal and electricity are highest for the center of the eastern region, whereas the costs of capital, labor and external environmental factors highlight the invisible social cost in the central and western regions to various degrees. (2) The efficiency distribution of exergy use in China's cement manufacturing industry reveals an incremental character from west to east, especially for the energy, labor and capital efficiencies. An evaluation of the environmental efficiency indicates that Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Shanxi have much higher environmental costs. (3) By building up the Euclidean distance model using the gross and efficiency results of exergy use, the 23 provinces could be classified into eight groups. (4) High industry concentration is the main driving factor of exergy efficiency improvement for cement manufacturing industry.
The impact of environmental regulations on firms' productivities is a hot topic at present, but little attention has been paid to the geographic location aspect. As the literature show two kinds of theories named "Cost hypothesis" and "Porter hypothesis" according to the impact of environmental regulations on firms' productivities, this paper empirically analyzes the influences of spatial difference and interdependence of environmental regulations on firms' productivity based geographic data and micro-firm-level data for the period of 2004-2007. Our results show that spatial difference of environmental regulations has a significant impact on firms' total factor productivity with an inverted U-shaped relationship. That is to say, appropriate intensity of environmental regulations could promote firms' productivities, but if the environmental regulations are too intensive, firms' productivity might decrease. The effect of spatial correlation of environmental regulation is significant. The environmental regulation of neighborhoods can promote the productivity of firms in native city. Environmental regulation has a significant impact on the firms with high efficiency, but no significant influence on firms with low efficiency. Besides, the impact of environmental regulation on productivity of pollution-intensive firms is variant according to geographic location. The promotion of environmental regulation on firms' productivity is stronger in the eastern region than in the central and western regions. Our research suggests different mechanisms for the Cost hypothesis and Porter hypothesis in the context of geographic location. The governments shall make different regulations in different parts of the country instead of one policy.
Thousands of traditional settlements with prominent historical and cultural information of China are considered as the Chinese traditional treasures. They play an important role in the new tide of current social-economic development and urbanization processes of China. Recently, the Landscape Gene Theory (LGT), which aims to dissect the cultural features of traditional settlements of China, is a powerful tool for a better understanding of the landscape patterns of traditional settlements and is gaining more and more attention. Plenty of prominent cultural factors derived from the traditional settlements are identified by LGT. These are very helpful knowledge about the intrinsic cultural features implicated in the traditional settlements. However, LGT does not still cope well with the co-relationships among landscape genes of traditional settlements. Therefore, LGT cannot capture the mechanisms between the prominent cultural factors and landscape images of traditional settlements. Targeted to partly resolve this issue, this paper employs methods in genome mapping of biology and LGT to integrate into a new research framework to address these mechanisms. The framework is named as Traditional Settlement Landscapes' Genome Maps (TSLGM) according to its conception and connotation. The paper is organized in the following orders. Firstly, it makes the definition and classification of TSLGM by the theoretical fundamental and essential features of LGT. Secondly, the functionalities and academic significances of TSLGM are also highlighted. Thirdly, practical flowcharts for constructing and organizing an instance of TSLGM are brought forward. Finally, 30 well-known traditional settlements of Hunan Province of China are taken as study areas. The paper portrays the spatial pattern for the 30 traditional settlements according to their TSLGM. Furthermore, a genome pattern identification of landscape genes of traditional settlements is performed by using Jinshan village of Rucheng County as an example. To sum up, this paper indicates that TSLGM plays a paramount role in capturing characteristics of the traditional settlements, which is a potential methodological progress for LGT. From this paper, it is found that TSLGM has some potential points in traditional settlement digitalization, planning pattern mining and characteristics of regional traditional landscapes identification.
In the period of rapid urbanization of China at present, studies on the meaning space structure in rural villages will be helpful for understanding the complicated psychological bond between community members and residential settings, and conducive to mitigate social frictions and conflicts caused by non-economic factors in the village demolition and relocation process. In this research, data were collected by semi-structured interview and participatory mapping techniques, and 251 residents from 9 villages were investigated. Those villages would be removed and relocated for the registration of Han Chang'an City Historical Site as a UNESCO World Culture Heritage. Through qualitative analysis of the interviews, 12 place feature categories, 7 place meaning categories and 34 place meaning sub-categories were identified. Based on the above attribute analysis, cross-tabulation analysis was used to examine the association between place features and meanings, and GIS tool was used to reveal and visualize the residents' place perception spatial configuration. The findings show that village, culture relics, house and people are among the significant place features, and person-place fit, personal feelings, historical-cultural connection, values and accomplishments are the important meaning categories. As the carriers, place features symbolize place meanings in both collective and selective ways. Place features form a system together with associated meanings, by which the place is defined and distinguished from other places. In addition, there exists a spatial pattern of residents' perceptions, which is characterized by the perception hotspot areas around the villages and relics, carrying important place meanings of local people in the study area. Feeling connection, place fit and personal identity make sense for the explanation to the revealed meaning space structure. The extending suggestion of this study is that the preservation of typical place features for local people in some forms will be helpful for the removal communities preserving homeland attachment.
Improving the quality of environment in ecologically fragile areas had been paid much attention by scholars and government at different levels. Over the past decade, a large number of rural labors had migrated into urban areas. To what extent would the migration affect the changes of vegetation cover in ecologically fragile areas? In this study, we analyzed the spatio-temporal variation of vegetation cover and its relationship with human activities at the county level based on the NDVI data with a resolution of 1 km, meteorological data and economic data from 2000 to 2010 in Inner Mongolia. The major methods included trend line analysis method, significance testing and multi-regression analysis method. The main conclusions were as follows: (1) The vegetation cover of the study area increased by 10.1% during 2000-2010. More than 28% of the vegetation cover increased significantly, and only about 2% decreased evidently during the study period. (2) The area with significant degradation presented a banded distribution in the northern fringe of farming-pastoral ecotone in the central part of Inner Mongolia. It is shown that the ecological environment is still fragile in this area, which should be focused on. The area where vegetation cover significantly improved showed a concentrated distribution in the southeast and west of Inner Mongolia. (3) Effects of agricultural labor on vegetation cover had exceeded those of natural factors such as climate. The emigration of agricultural labor had improved vegetation cover significantly.
Place is a subjective creation of human groups at regional level. Its structure changes with differences among diverse identity groups. In order to explore the dimensions and structure of placeness identity, this paper selects Barkhor Street in Lhasa as a case to conduct an empirical research from the tourists' perspective. Involving theoretical construction and empirical test, the research uses Grounded Theory and SEM to enrich the theoretical connotation of place theory and provide reference for further research. The authors build an exploratory theoretical model of tourists' placeness identity, which includes three categories-perceptional space, living space and subjective space, and seven subcategories-natural distinctiveness, cultural distinctiveness, self-efficiency, environmental manageability, consistency, attachment and self-esteem. Placeness identity is not a metaphysical concept, but a concept existing in the heart of each tourist. A questionnaire was developed to measure tourists' placeness identity. The scale consists of 23 items, which belong to seven dimensions. The scale is well-formed and has a good reliability and validity. The study finds that tourists tend to agree with the features of Barkhor Street' placeness. Perceptional space has the highest score, followed by living space and subjective space. In the seven subcategories, cultural distinctiveness is the highest, followed by natural distinctiveness, attachment, self-efficiency, environmental manageability, self-esteem, and consistency. This paper designed five competition models according to the theoretical structure. With confirmatory factor analysis, model five was found to be the best model which has good convergent validity and discriminant validity. The conclusion confirms the effectiveness of the exploratory model. In addition, this paper discusses the formation procedure of placeness, and the interaction between the production of space and placeness identity, as well as the level progression and transformation of placeness identity.
Widely influenced by "violence and terrorism" activities that are organized by the terrorist organization "the East Turkistan Movement" in China, the imaginative geography of Xinjiang has recently changed a lot. As "the East Turkistan Movement" tries to secede Xinjiang away from China by carrying out "violence and terrorism" activities in and out of Xinjiang, the geographical imagination of Xinjiang is gradually changing from a place of beauty and romance into a space of terror and danger. This article focuses on the variation of the geographical imagination of Xinjiang by exploring how Chinese internet media have impact upon it, and discusses how such variation gets involved into Chinese government's policy of anti-terrorism by employing the theory of critical (popular) geopolitics. To this regard, this article pays attention to how Chinese internet media, such as Baidu News, 360 News, Sougou News, and Sina Weibo, produce, practice, negotiate, and reproduce the geographical meanings of the place and space of Xinjiang, by drawing on the textual analysis and online anthropological exploration of the discursive practice of abovementioned internet media and audiences' responses to them. In doing so, this article summarizes the empirical studies in this body of research. It can be concluded that, the internet media produces the negative geographical knowledge of Xinjiang by representing and spreading the information of "violence and terrorism" activities in and out of Xinjiang, and thereby constructing the negative geographical imagination of Xinjiang. Furthermore, such imagination is incessantly negotiated and reproduced in the process of media consuming by audiences. The negotiation and the reproduction of the geographical meanings of Xinjiang positively get involved into and keep in consistence with Chinese government's policy of anti-terrorism, thus the critical (popular) geopolitics model of Chinese anti-terrorism is constructed in the end of this article. Finally, this article could be widely read as a contribution to: (1) human geography, which gets engaged in the discussion of people's everyday life in producing geographical meanings into geography studies; (2) geopolitics, which subverts the paradigm of traditional geopolitical studies that focuses on the influence of the ontological and objective geography upon statecraft practices, and turns to viewing the imaginative geography as an important research object in geopolitical studies; (3) governance, by which the study of internet media is valuable and meaningful for government's guidance of the discourse of mass media.
With the rapid urbanization and motorization in China, the increasing car ownership promotes the dependence on automobile commuting, and hinders sustainable development and leads to serious traffic congestion and environment pollution as well. Based on the questionnaire survey from the residents in the central city of Shanghai, a multinomial logit model was applied to explore the impact of built environment on residents' commuting mode. It is concluded that the urban built environment has a significant effect on the choice of motorized commuting. Specifically, after limiting other factors, improving population density, mixed land use and the proportion of crossroads in residential areas may help refrain the choice of automobile commuting, while urban built environment of employment areas has less impact on residential choice commuting mode. Besides, the built environment has different impacts on commuting mode choice due to heterogeneity of individual socio-economic characteristics. The policy implication of the research results is that commuting mode could be optimized by improving land use planning and transit environment designing.
Car use has changed daily activity travel patterns, which cause serious urban problems including air pollution, traffic congestion, road accidents, and community severance. Particularly in China's rapid suburbanization, car use and related social and environmental issues are attracting great attention. Previous research has illustrated the importance of the built environment and car ownership on daily car travel distance. However, it is still not clear how car ownership and car use impact individual behavior, and the ways researchers measure the contextual influence of the built environment are not consistent. Most of the existing literature only uses residential area as the geographic context to study the impact of built environment, and only a few studies focus on workplaces or other destinations. In recent years, the uncertain geographic context problem has come under intense scrutiny by geographers seeking to elucidate the interaction between urban space and individual behavior. According to this phenomenon of the uncertain geographic context, travel behavior is influenced not only by the origin and destinations of trips, but also by the travel routes and the surrounding activity spaces. However, so far few studies have been conducted on the impact of activity space. Based on a GPS-facilitated activity-travel survey dataset collected in the Shangdi-Qinghe area in Beijing in 2012, the present paper studies the relationship between the built environment and car travel behavior of suburban residents on weekdays. To understand the importance of geographic context, three types of geographic context are used: residential area, work location and activity space. The impact of the built environment on car travel distance in daily travel, commuting travel and non-work travel is analyzed using three sets in a linear regression model. The study finds that the impact of the built environment on car travel behavior depends on travel mode and geographic context, and the built environment in work locations and activity spaces has a larger impact on car travel distance than that in residential areas. The built environment in residential areas has an influence on daily travel distance, but lower development density and better residential accessibility in residential areas can reduce car travel distance in commuting. Higher development density in both work locations and activity spaces is related to longer car travel distance in daily life, commuting and non-work travel behavior. Contrary to the findings of Western studies, better accessibility to public transit leads to more car use in non-work travel. This paper discusses the importance of the uncertain geographic context problem, indicating that activity space plays an important role in daily activity travel behavior. These findings have key implications for policy-making decision. The built environment should be a great concern in policies aimed at car use limitation.
Percy Maude Roxby (1880-1947), as a prominent geographer originated from Britain scholarship during the first half of twentieth century, traveled in China, studied and wrote Chinese geography. Meanwhile, he promoted mutual understanding between China and Britain through geography. He also supervised the Department of Geography at Liverpool University and trained Chinese geographers. Overall, Percy Maude Roxby played a significant role in Chinese geography including his own research, the internationalization of Chinese geography, and cultivation of Chinese scholars, all of which should be included in the history of modern Chinese geography.
