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Following the notion of the entrepreneurial city, this paper examines recent scholarship about China's urban governance. Despite prevailing marketisation, the role of the state is visible in neighbourhood, cities and city-regions. The state necessarily deals with a fast changing society and deploys market-like instruments to achieve its development objectives. Through multi-scalar governance, the state involves social and market actors but at the same time maintains strategic intervention capacity. China's contextualised scholarship provides a more nuanced understanding beyond the entrepreneurial city thesis, which is more state-centred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dialectical relationship between 'big D' Development (broadly, the formal interventionist, international Development sector) and little 'd' development (the immanent structures and processes of capitalism) is a concept widely invoked in Geography and Development Studies. In this paper, we ask how the d/Development dialectic is evolving under current conjunctures of emergent state capitalism(s). We suggest that, going beyond 'containment', Development is ever more deeply inhabited by (capitalist) development; with implications for its palliative and restructuring roles, and for praxis, contestation and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a 'provincialised' critical geography of area studies by tracing the spatial genealogy of three waves of Chinese world regional geography and foreign area studies. The shifting terrains have been shaped strongly by the continually reconfigured power-geometries and Chinese thinking of 'the international'. The two coeval fields and knowledge production therein are situated in place-specific institutional contexts, which engender contingent disciplinary geographies and their enduring lack of dialogue. The contemporary regeneration of Chinese 'world-writing' brings its own identities and discourses, power relations and complex impacts to local-global epistemic (in)equality, which requires and rewards further critical mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the integration of the human-environment system has been an important part of Chinese human geography for over a century, constituting the distinctive academic nature of the field. Human geography has been established as an interdiscipline of natural science and social science, highlighting the combination of academic inquiry and decision application, and exploring the interaction mechanisms and sustainable development model between the human sphere and natural sphere at different spatial scales. The development of the discipline is in line with the basic concepts advocated by the global research platform "Future Earth", which has promoted the strong development of human geography in China, and has produced important societal influences. By selecting some of the most influential academic achievements, this paper briefly describes theoretical methods and social contributions to reflect the development process of human geography in the study of integrated human and environment systems in different stages in China. It also demonstrates the influence of the following elements on the adherence of Chinese human geography to the integration of human and environment systems: classical Chinese philosophical thinking on harmony between people and land, western theories of the human-environment relationship, Soviet economic geography research methods, the science of sustainability, the social demands of the construction of contemporary Chinese ecological civilization, ever-improving mathematical models and big data methods for studying enormous and complex systems, and management system reform and special scientific research system and background in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of urban entrepreneurialism is proclaimed surprisingly by opposite conceptualisations of austerity urbanism and radical municipalism. This paper argues that rather than seeing them as contrasting types, post-pandemic statecraft reflects the increasing tension and entanglement between capitalistic and territorial logic. From the ground of Chinese urban governance, we illustrate how Chinese statecraft maintains state strategic and extra-economic intention through deploying and mobilising market and society – to create its own agents and to co-opt those that are already existent or emerging. This statecraft is illustrated through community building, urban development, and regional formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism geography did not exist in China before 1978. Since its birth shortly after the 1978 reforms, it has been growing rapidly. After a brief period of growth with strong interests in theoretical issues, the field over the last two decades has been dominated by applied work. This is attributable to the rise of tourism as an important source of national and local income which demands better planning of tourism resources, and to the neoliberalization of the educational system at the university level. Topics of theoretical inquiry are suggested for the development of a more balanced tourism geography in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report focuses on the now substantial international rural geography literature on the emergence of so-called ‘resource peripheries’, linked to the economic expansion of rapidly industrializing nations such as India and China. The report outlines the major foci and key arguments of this body of work, noting its connections to, but also elaborations of, important concepts used within rural geography, including global commodity chains and their multi-scalar governance, involving, in part, political, economic and social relations between corporations and local communities. Noting the influence of numerous Marxian concepts in this body of work’s intellectual development, the report draws further potential links with the ‘dis/articulations’ scholarship that has recently emerged out of a critique of the global commodity/value chain research, including notions of dispossession, disempowerment and primitive accumulation. Relatedly, aspects of multi-scalar and multi-sector governance in natural resource extraction are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 10 years, research on Chinese urban form has grown rapidly both in China itself and in other parts of the world. At the same time Chinese cities have undergone unprecedented growth and transformation, presenting great challenges for the comprehension and management of urban landscape change. In planning future urban morphological research during this period of exceptional flux, an important first step is to take stock of past research, especially that of the recent past. Hitherto research on Chinese urban form across a range of disciplines, including architectural history, urban planning, archaeology and urban geography, has tended to be descriptive and has contained scant comparison, either of findings or methods, with that on towns and cities in other parts of the world. Future research on Chinese urban form can benefit from exploring the efficacy of urban morphological concepts and methods that have been developed and applied elsewhere in the world, especially Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional Chinese historical geography is closely related to yange dili. Concepts relating to man-land relations are the underlying theories. The Yugong Society played a key role in the transformation of the Chinese historical geography from yange dili to modern historical geography. In the second half of the twentieth century, Chinese historical geographers made substantial contributions. Two main themes are the geographical change through time and the reconstruction of past geographies. Major research topics include changes of national territories and administrative divisions, changes of physical environments, urban geography, population, agricultural geography, social and cultural aspects, general and regional geographies, historical cartographics, and other aspects. Chinese historical geography is indigenous, but with western influence. Nevertheless, the Chinese historical geography is still very much descriptive and lags behind the west in theoretical research. Most Chinese historical geographers are originally trained historians. Hence they are more interested in studies of changes through time than in researches of spatial variations. Chinese historical geography is maturing as a respected field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Regional inequality is one of the major subjects of research on China, and is a major concern to the Chinese government. This article reviews the copious research on regional inequality in China. It is proposed that recent research has significantly improved our understanding of regional inequality but that problems still exist. It is also argued that multiscale studies and investigations of the various mechanisms that affect inequality will further improve future research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In this paper I seek to review recent work on Chinese urban geography and to appraise the development of China's urban geography as a field of study both inside and outside China. The temporal scope will span scholarship finished and published mainly during the 1980s." The focus is on works published in English. The author examines the primary topics of interest, methodologies and theories, and available sources of data., (excerpt)