The Extent of In Situ Urbanisation in China’s County Areas

By developing and using indexes reflecting “quasi-urban” status, this paper attempts to quantitatively estimate the “invisible” contribution of in situ urbanisation to the overall urbanisation process in the county areas of Fujian Province. The results show that the urbanisation level of the county areas in Fujian Province would be significantly increased if the urban characteristics resulting from in situ urbanisation were fully reflected, suggesting that the conventional urban statistics seriously underestimate the true extent of rural-urban transformation in the county areas. Furthermore, such underestimation is more serious in the coastal areas with most dynamic socioeconomic development, and thus distorts the true picture of the spatial pattern of rural-urban transformation. The paper explores the implications of the above results for the understanding of China’s urbanisation process, suggesting that rural-urban transformation and the corresponding planning practice in China should be conceptualised in the context of blurred rural-urban distinction and more important roles for rural areas in the urbanisation process

Single-electron turnstile pumping with high frequencies

In this Letter, we present a theoretical analysis to single-electron pumping operation in a large range of driving frequencies through the time-dependent tunneling barriers controlled by external gate voltages. We show that the single-electron turnstile works at the frequency lower than the characteristic frequency which is determined by the mean average electron tunneling rate. When the driving frequency is greater than the characteristic frequency of electron tunnelings, fractional electron pumping occurs as an effect of quantum coherence tunneling.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure