Geographers and China

Abstract

This paper reviews the discipline of China geography and the contributions China geographers have made to the field of China studies, focusing primarily on the period since World War Ⅱ and on China geographers working in North America. Outside of the PRC and North America, other key centers are in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. China geographers (outside of China) are relatively few in number but have been increasingly productive ever since the opening of China in the late 1970s and the resulting expanded opportunities for doing fieldwork and collaboration with scholars there. This paper provides synopses of leading China geographers in order to offer insights into the scope and evolution of the discipline. The field has become increasingly sophisticated, and the practitioners are increasingly Chinese émigrés. Publications have been heavily focused on urban geography, as well as various aspects of economic geography, environmental studies, and cultural geography. Major gaps remain in cultural, historical, social, population, and political geography. These gaps are areas of greatest interest to other China scholars-thereby accounting, in part, for the low visibility of China geographers. Collaborative research, especially in these areas, greater involvement in the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and similar organizations, and more publications in China studies journals could help to raise visibility.