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.
From the perspective of interlocking network, this paper compares two methods of defining urban hinterworld in the Yangtze River Delta, including the measurement of connectivity and relative connectivity. According to the theory of space of flows, relational data of enterprise branches is selected on the county-level space units in the 16 core cities. Three features have been identified. First, regional network structure could be revealed through the measurement of connectivity but the relative weak connections would be omitted. Second, administrative economy and cross-border connections could be examined deeply through the measurement of relative connectivity, especially to those space units with smaller aggregated connectivity. Third, combining these two methods together, a new way of defining urban hinterworld is proposed which could both reflect the connections between cities and also show the spaciality in the region. The findings of this paper are meaningful when the regional policies are formulated. The division of hinterworld is helpful for assessing the influences of cities and determining reasonable urban system. Empirical results enrich our understanding of the hinterworld in which both relatively strong and relatively weak connections exist at the same time. New perspectives and ways are provided to describe and analyze the relationship between center city and its hinterworld. In the new background and theoretical system, only through analysis of multi-angle observation and combination of a variety of methods we could have a deeper understanding of the regional city network, which is also an important area for future research concern.
Industry-university-research institute collaborative innovation process and its spatial structures attract the interest of researchers in many fields. With the rise of emerging economies and their technological upgrading, their spatial structure of innovation network is developing into an important research topic. And China, in particular, provides the opportunity to study the evolution of such network structures. With the help of some sophisticated data analysis software like SPSS, UCINET and ArcGIS, this paper discusses the above-mentioned issues based on graphical analysis and an empirical analysis of co-inventor networks of China's equipment manufacturing industry using patent data issued by the State Intellectual Property Office of P.R.China from 1985 to 2012. We reached three conclusions about the structural evolution of the industry-university-research institute collaborative innovation network of Chinese equipment manufacture industry. Firstly, our systematic examination has identified a rapid growth of patents and significant changes of actor composition from 1985 to 2012, which shows the rise of privately owned enterprises and universities around 2000, with universities standing out as the most significant and strongest actors in the process of building innovation networks, while state-owned enterprises only dominate some specific fields. Secondly, city-level is the major geographical scale of industry-university-research institute collaboration in developed cities; while undeveloped cities tend to cooperate with competent ones at provincial or national level. It is mainly because concentration of universities and firms with strong innovative ability makes it easy to find the perfect local partner, while weaker actors have to look for the best innovation partners across city boundaries. Last but not least, political decisions concerning R&D investment supported by provincial governments have a positive influence on interprovincial innovation activities. Meanwhile, the spatial political bias in China can lead to the hierarchical structure of Chinese innovation networks, which shows the significance of municipalities and provincial capital like Peking, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The evolution of inter-city network influenced by globalization and information technology has become a hot topic in city and urban research. This study tries to explore the evolution of nodal hierarchy and communities in inter-city network based on passenger train network during the rapid development period of High-speed Railway (HSR) in China since 2003. Results indicate that: (1) the evolved HSR network in China enlarged the disparities of weighted degree centrality between regions, but decreased the disparities of that between communities, and led to an increasing concentrated city hierarchy with fewer cities having high centrality value, and a growing similarity between the city hierarchies measured by the passenger train network and by city attributes (such as population and GDP); (2) the city hierarchy measured by passenger train network followed a rank-size distribution in the national and regional levels, as well as in some communities. (3) Spatially, cities with higher hierarchy in passenger train network and larger improvement in weighted centrality indicator were mostly located in the eastern region or the areas with the distance to the nearest HSR stations below 50 km, developed economy and high population density; the cities in 2013 could be divided into 14 communities, including the communities with cities mainly located along Beijing-Shanghai, Beijing-Wuhan and Wuhan-Chengdu, Wuhan-Guangzhou, Beijing-Jiujiang, Hangzhou-Xiamen, Lanzhou-Urumqi trunk rail lines, and located in Northeast China, Shanxi Province, Inner Mongolia. (4) The evolution of communities was mostly influenced by the natural environment and administrative areas, especially by the development of HSR network.
High-speed traffic network, as a significant power in molding the spatial structure of regional interaction, has the key indications. In this paper, we constructed a three-dimension matrix of "Origin-Destination-Time" time-evolving network data, which consists of expressway traffic flow among 59 counties and time-evolving series from January 2004 to December 2012 in Jiangsu, a coastal province in China. Supported by the data, we introduce the Non-negative Tensor Factorization (NTF) method to analyze its evolutionary stages and spatio-temporal structure, and then attempt to extract the abstract theoretical model. The conclusions can be drawn as follows: (1) The temporal structure of Jiangsu expressway traffic flow network has three obvious evolutionary stages, namely, January 2004 to April 2005, May 2005 to June 2008, and July 2008 to December 2012. The corresponding spatial structure in three stages are reversed "T" structure, revesed "下" structure and revesed "不" structure, respectively. (2) The stage evolution of high-speed traffic network has always been a key component of the whole spatio-temporal evolution process, which displays the tendency phase division in the long term and the fluctuant variations in the short term. In terms of the evolutionary stages of expressway traffic flow network, Jiangsu has entered the network promotion enrichment stage. (3) Based on the empirical study of Jiangsu's experience, the evolution process theoretical model of expressway traffic flow network can be divided into six stages, i.e., the network scattered distribution stage, the local network construction stage, the regional preliminary connected stage, the network development into a net stage, the network promotion enrichment stage and the network integration stage.
To explore the current trend of the global container shipping network vulnerability, the analytical approach and quantitative methods were put forward for researching the change rate of the network vulnerability. We chose the routes distribution data from the world's main container liner companies in 2004 and 2014 as the study foundation. Sorted by the node degrees, the ports were gradually removed at a proportion from 1% to 10%. The quantitative foundation was the change rates of the eigenvalues before and after node removal, including the eigenvalues of network average degree, network clustering coefficient, network isolated-node proportion, network average shortest-path length and network efficiency. With the proposed pressure test, we calculated the weights and the values that each network eigenvalue has influence on the network vulnerability. Then we obtained the values of the change on the container shipping network vulnerability within the range of setting attack strength. The result shows that the vulnerability of the global container shipping network has the trend of becoming weaker in recent 10 years under intentional attack. When the scale of attack is less than 10% of the whole network, the vulnerability of the container shipping network has weakened by about 6.1%. The research conclusion in this paper has an important significance for deepening the research of port geography, and the analytical approach and method also provide reference to network characteristics analysis in other fields.
The market forecast plays a key role in tourism decision-making. However, due to lack of historical data, it remains an unsolved problem for the tourist market forecast of destinations which are not yet open to the public. Shanghai Disneyland has attracted wide attention for its huge investment and profound influence. With its forthcoming development, it is imperative to carry out a theoretical research in this field.
The existing tourism gravity model is presented with three main explanatory variables: attractiveness of tourist destination, emissiveness of tourist origin, and spatial damping between the destination and origin. This paper makes modifications on the model as follows: (1) It introduces tourist rate which aims at replacing total population with tourist population to measure the tourist scale and accurately determine its base quota. (2) It introduces the element of tourist willingness, which is measured and estimated by using Baidu Index to clarify the preference for tourism destination. Thus, the scope of applying gravity model is not solely confined within the large and medium-scale tourist destinations (namely, cities, provinces and countries). The modified gravity model can also be applicable to the small-scale tourist destinations (namely, scenic spots). Likewise, it will avoid the interference of intervening opportunity. Furthermore, there is no significant correlation between any two variables in the modified model.
Based on statistics of mainland tourists to Hong Kong Disneyland and socioeconomic statistics of China's provinces and municipalities from 2009 to 2013, this paper forecasts the spatial structure of domestic tourist market of Shanghai Disneyland through the modified gravity model. The research shows that: (1) Disneyland's strong brand effect drives tourists to overcome obstacles, so the impact brought about by spatial damping is reduced to some degree; as a whole, tourism demand of mainland tourists for Disneyland is inelastic. (2) The spatial distribution of domestic tourist market of Shanghai Disneyland remains strongly concentrated in neighboring regions accoding to the distance-decay theory. It is also mainly concentrated in eastern region and major cities driven by level of socioeconomic development. Based on the forecast of this paper, the Yangtze River Delta region is expected to account for 71.45% of the domestic market share, and China's eastern region occupies 82.40%, 39 major cities 41.44%. (3) Through verification, the coincident degree between the theoretical value deduced from the modified tourism gravity model and the actual value is better than that between the theoretical value deduced from the existing model and the actual value. Accordingly, the newly modified tourism gravity model proves to be more effective than the existing model.
With the development of interdisciplinary research, "place" theory in human geography has been applied to all aspects of the tourism research. At the same time, under the influences of modernization and urbanization, "placelessness" is emerged from the emptiness of the sense of place and the unrealistic development of space. Also, "placelessness" has become another perspective to study "place". Taking the five-star hotels in Guangzhou as case studies, we discuss the space perceptions and senses of place toward five-star hotels of the consumers and analyze the twisted interaction of the complex relationship between place and placelessness based on the relevant place and placelessness theories. Field observation, in-depth interview and text analysis are used for the research. The research indicates that: (1) The city high-class hotels have dual characteristics of "place" and "placelessness" with the effects of the modern technology, the industry standards and the capital expansion making the high-class hotel "placelessness" and the social functions, the uniqueness of the brand and the activities of hotel management creating "place" characteristics. (2) Hotel consumers are struggling between "other space" and "my space" with multiple and contradictive sense of "place" and "placelessness" in the city high-class hotels. (3) City high-class hotels are places in transition. The transformations between "place" and "placelessness" depend on the frequency of communications between the consumers and the hotel space, the stability of hotel products, and the consumers' imaginations and meanings attached to the hotel space. This research is not only a supplement for western theory of place, but also an attempt to research on "placelessness" in China. The research provides an analytical framework for the urban phenomenon of spatial homogeneity in the transitional China..
Under the background of globalization, more and more food brands are chosen to conduct translocal production. Environmental differences of places provide an opportunity for rebranding, and lead to the phenomena of translocal upgrading of food brands. As for the cases in which brands in developed regions have upgraded in less developed regions, economic factors cannot be used to fully explain such phenomena. So it is necessary to study the influencing factors from the perspective of social and cultural geography. Based on current literatures, a conceptual model depicting the relationships among country-of-origin image, local consumer culture, brand awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty and purchase intention is proposed and empirically examined with a case study of H?agen-Dazs in Guangzhou. The empirical findings are as follows. First, in the process of translocal expansion, food brands would face cultural conflicts. In their adaptation to the new environment, food brands realize the process of translocal rebranding. H?agen-Dazs has completed its cultural reproduction in China now. It has successfully upgraded in China. Price has become the representative of brand upgrading. Second, both country-of-origin image and local consumer culture have significant positive influences on brand awareness and perceived quality, and then lead to positive impacts on brand loyalty and purchase intention. Cultural and geographical factors are proved as powerful tools to explain the translocal food rebranding. Third, this paper draws two unexpected conclusions that brand awareness/association does not significantly impact brand loyalty and perceived quality does not significantly impact purchase intention. Fourth, in the low purchase frequency group, consumers' perceived quality of H?agen-Dazs is significantly impacted by the country of origin image and local consumer culture, while the impact is not significant in the high purchase frequency group. The study will not only help to promote the theory of translocal food culture production, but also supplement the theory of rebranding. Meanwhile it will promote an international dialogue in food geography.
