Progress of economic geography in China's mainland since 2000

Economic geography in China's mainland has developed in a different way from that in many other countries. On the one hand, it has been increasingly active in participating in academic dialogues and knowledge development led by Anglophone countries; on the other hand, it takes practice-based and policy-oriented research, i.e. satisfying the demands from the Chinese government and society, as the linchpin of research. Since there has been a lot of literature reviewing the development of economic geography in the country before the new millennium, this paper will make a comprehensive analysis of the discipline in 2000-2015, based on a bibliometric survey and research projects done by Chinese economic geographers. The analysis indicates that (1) economic geography research in China's mainland is unevenly distributed but concentrated in several leading institutions; (2) traditional research fields like human-nature system, regional disparity, industrial location and transportation geography remain dominant while new topics such as globalization, multinational corporations and foreign direct investments, information and communication technology, producer services, climate change and carbon emission emerge as important research areas; (3) Chinese economic geography is featured by policy-oriented research funded by government agencies, having considerable impacts on regional policy making in China, both national and regional. To conclude, the paper argues that the development of economic geography in China's mainland needs to follow a dual track in the future, i.e. producing knowledge for the international academic community and undertaking policy-oriented research to enhance its role as a major consulting body for national, regional and local development

Intercomparison of two cavity ring-down spectroscopy analyzers for atmospheric (CO2)-C-13/(CO2)-C-12 measurement

Isotope ratio infrared spectroscopy (IRIS) permits continuous in situ measurement of CO2 isotopic composition under ambient conditions. Previous studies have mainly focused on single IRIS instrument performance; few studies have considered the comparability among different IRIS instruments. In this study, we carried out laboratory and ambient measurements using two Picarro CO2 delta C-13 analyzers (G1101-i and G2201-i (newer version)) and evaluated their performance and comparability. The best precision was 0.08-0.15% for G1101-i and 0.01-0.04% for G2201-i. The dependence of delta C-13 on CO2 concentration was 0.46% per 100 ppm and 0.09% per 100 ppm, the instrument drift ranged from 0.92-1.09% and 0.19-0.37 parts per thousand, and the sensitivity of delta C-13 to the water vapor mixing ratio was 1.01 parts per thousand/% H2O and 0.09 parts per thousand/% H2O for G1101-i and G2201-i, respectively. The accuracy after correction by the two-point mixing ratio gain and offset calibration method ranged from -0.04-0.09 parts per thousand for G1101-i and 0.13-0.03 parts per thousand for G2201-i. The sensitivity of delta C-13 to the water vapor mixing ratio improved from 1.01% / % H2O before the upgrade of G1101-i (G1101-i-original) to 0.15% / % H2O after the upgrade of G1101-i (G1101-i-upgraded). Atmospheric delta C-13 measured by G1101-i and G2201-i captured the rapid changes in atmospheric delta C-13 signals on hourly to diurnal cycle scales, with a difference of 0.07 +/- 0.24% between G1101-i-original and G2201-i and 0.05 +/- 0.30% between G1101-i-upgraded and G2201-i. A significant linear correlation was observed between the delta C-13 difference of G1101i-original and G2201-i and the water vapor concentration, but there was no significant correlation between the delta C-13 difference of G1101-i-upgraded and G2201-i and the water vapor concentration. The difference in the Keeling intercept values decreased from 1.24% between G1101-i-original and G2201-i to 0.36% between G1101-i-upgraded and G2201-i, which indicates the importance of consistency among different IRIS instruments

The allocation and management of critical resources in rural China under restructuring: Problems and prospects

Rapid and far-reaching development transition has triggered corresponding restructuring in rural China especially since the turn of the new millennium. Recently, there has been an increasing trend emphasizing regional resources in formulating rural development policy and restructuring rural areas. This paper analyzes the rural restructuring in China affected by the allocation and management of critical resources including human resource, land resource and capital, by establishing a theoretical framework of "elements-structure-function" of rural territorial system. It is argued that rural restructuring is a process of optimizing the allocation and management of the material and non-material elements affecting the development of rural areas and accomplishing the structure optimization and the function maximum of rural development system. Due to the constraints from the maintained urban-rural dualism of land ownership and household registration, the rapid rural restructuring under both globalization and the implementation of the national strategies on industrialization, urbanization, informatization and agricultural modernization, the changes of the allocation of critical resources have brought about many problems and challenges for the future development of rural China, such as the nonagriculturalization, non-grain preference and abandonment of farmland use together with the derelict and idle rural housing land, the weakening mainbody of rural development, the unfair urban rural allocation of capital and its structural imbalance, and so on. Aiming at how to resolve the problems and adapt to the challenges, it is pivotal to restructure the rural development space, rural industry, and rural social organization and management mainbody. Furthermore, it is necessary to restructure the contours of state intervention in rural societies and economies and allocate and manage the critical resources affecting rural development, from the perspectives of integrating urban and rural resources, improving the efficiency of resources utilization, and fully understanding the influences of globalization on rural restructuring in China. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license

A Rainfall Model Based on a Geographically Weighted Regression Algorithm for Rainfall Estimations over the Arid Qaidam Basin in China

Accurate rainfall estimations based on ground-based rainfall observations and satellite-based rainfall measurements are essential for hydrological and environmental modeling in the Qaidam Basin of China. We evaluated the accuracy of daily and monthly scale Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) rainfall products in the Qaidam Basin. A Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) was used to estimate the spatial distribution of the TRMM product error using altitude and geographical latitude and longitude as independent variables. Finally, a rainfall model was developed by combining ground-based and satellite-based rainfall measurements, and the model precision was validated with a cross-validation method based on rainfall gauge measurements. The TRMM precipitation observations may contain errors compared with the ground-measured precipitation, and the error for daily data was higher than that for monthly data. A time series of TRMM rainfall measurements at the same location showed errors at certain time intervals. The ground-based and satellite-based rainfall GWR model improved the error in the TRMM rainfall products. This rainfall estimation model with a 1-km spatial resolution is applicable in the Qaidam Basin in which there is a sparse network of rainfall gauges, and is significant for spatial investigations of hydrology and climate change

Responding to common questions on the conservation of agricultural heritage systems in China

Although the urgency of their conservation has been recognized, Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) since 2002 and China Nationally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (China-NIAHS) certified by the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) of China since 2012 are faced with questions as to why to conserve them, what is to be conserved, who should conserve them, and how? This paper attempts to clarify and respond to such questions focusing on the conservation of agricultural heritage systems in China based on a review of both theoretical and practical progress. Agricultural heritage systems exhibit a multitude of values for sustainable and equitable development and therefore should be conserved for both present and future generations. Unlike most conventional heritages, the conservation of agricultural heritage systems is a complex, systematic "engineering" in which both physical and biological components and associated socio-cultural processes should be conserved in a dynamic way. Farmers and heritage sites must benefit from the continuance of traditional agricultural production under the premise of ecological functions being sustained and traditional culture being inherited. For a more effective conservation, a multi-stakeholder process should be established involving governments at different levels, multi-disciplinary scientists, communities and farmers, and business enterprises as well as social organizations. As has been demonstrated, the conservation of agricultural heritage systems aims to promote the regional sustainable development, to improve the livelihood, food security and well-being of farm people, and to provide references for the development of modern agriculture in China

Sustainability evaluation of end-of-life vehicle recycling based on emergy analysis: a case study of an end-of-life vehicle recycling enterprise in China

As issues concerning "circular economy" and "sustainable development" have been advocated globally, the recycling, reuse, recovery or disposal of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) have gained more and more attention. Toxic substances and wasted resources within ELVs make evaluating the sustainability of ELV recycling enterprises to be especially important for sound ELV management. In this study, an improved emergy analysis with traditional and revised emergy indices was employed for evaluation of the efficiency and sustainability of ELV recycling enterprises. The constructed emergy indicator system not only reflected the ELV recycling system's resource, environmental, economic and technological efficiency, but also made a multi-scale and multi-dimensional evaluation of the system according to its industrial characteristics. An ELV recycling enterprise in Jiangxi Province, China, as a case, was studied employing the proposed method and indicator system. The results showed that the enterprise involved in the study had strong competitive ability with relatively high economic benefit, and had a moderate environmental impact compared with other industrial systems. The emergy sustainability index indicated that the recycling enterprise was both economically and environmentally sustainable in the long term. However, the emergy technical efficiency indices indicated that the technical level and operational efficiency of the ELV recycling enterprise were relatively low and more investment should be put into the improvement of the recycling technologies. The results of the study can provide useful information for the decision makers to manage ELV recycling enterprises considering not only economic benefits but also the environmental benefits in the long term. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Changes in productivity, efficiency and technology of China's crop production under rural restructuring

Food security is the fundamental problem of sustainable socioeconomic development in China. Since the 1990s, due to rapid socioeconomic development, the loss of cultivated land in China has become increasingly serious. In the context of inefficient assurances about the quantity of cultivated land, improving the productivity of crop production has become an important breakthrough in the new era to ensure food security in China. At present, China's agricultural development is at the stage of transition from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture. In the course of the agricultural transformation in China, what change has occurred to the total factor productivity (TFP) of crop production under rural restructuring becomes a problem worthy of in-depth study. Therefore, this study used the panel data of 31 provinces/autonomous regions in China from 1999 to 2008, and combined the traditional three-stage Malmquist productivity index (MPI) with the Bootstrap-Malmquist productivity index (Bootstrap-MPI) to measure the changes of the TFP of crop production in China. On the whole, the traditional MPI model underestimated the TFP of China's crop production and its components, the technical change (TC) index and technical efficiency change (TEC) index. After the ratification with the bootstrap method, the TFP of China's crop production had an annual average increase rate of 6.1% from 1999 to 2008, with obvious fluctuations in different time periods. Since the implementation of the protective policy for grain purchase prices in the 1990s, the TFP of crop production in China began to decrease. However, the TFP increased dramatically after the rural tax reform 2002-2003. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

华北平原玉米叶片光合及呼吸过程对实验增温的适应性

利用典型农田生态系统的原位实验增温平台,探讨我国华北平原重要农作物玉米叶片光合及呼吸过程对实验增温的适应性,并深入分析其产生适应性的原因和机理。研究结果显示,实验增温使玉米叶片净光合速率(An)显著升高(P<0.001),同时增温也导致An的最适温度(Topt)升高1.56℃;相似地,实验增温也同样导致了光合作用过程中最大电子传递速率(Jmax)显著增加(P0.05)。然而,实验增温却显著降低了玉米叶片的暗呼吸速率(Rd)及其Q10值(P0.05)。此外,尽管实验增温显著提高了玉米叶片的蒸腾速率(Tr),但却并没有显著改变叶片的气孔导度(Gs)及水分利用效率(WUE)。本研究结果表明,玉米可以通过调控叶片光合及呼吸等关键生理过程的最适温度对增温产生一定的适应性。然而,尽管玉米能够在叶片尺度上做出调整来适应增温环境,但这种适应能力却十分有限,以至于未来气候变暖仍可能会对华北平原玉米的生长发育过程和粮食产量造成一定的影响