With the rapid development of information and network technology, as well as the increasingly perfect home service system, a growing number of people are unwilling or unable to go out to achieve their travel goals. According to the Statistical Report on the Development of the Internet in China, until the end of 2018, there were 829 million Internet users in China. Thus, the realization of virtual tourism through the Internet is the most ideal solution for a large number of “residential” people who are unwilling or unable to travel. The research of online virtual tourism at home and abroad focuses on: 1) The development of virtual tourism; 2) The application of virtual tourism technologies; 3) The value of virtual tourism and its marketing strategies, 4) The education of virtual tourism and elderly services. The online virtual tourism started late in China and it began to come alive until after 2016, but it has developed rapidly in recent years, and has shown the characteristics of product diversification, technology integration, entertainment demand, user popularization and leisurely function. At present, the main problems need to be solved are: 1) The technical realization of improving the effect of 3D high-definition dynamic simulation, and solutions can start with improving the effect of 3D high-definition dynamic simulation of virtual tourism; 2) Using the advantages of new technologies such as AR to solve the problem of lack of on-site experience, and solutions can be found in taking advantage of new technologies such as AR; and 3) Solving the problem of how scenic spots benefit from online virtual tourism, and solutions can start with improving the benefit diversification in the scenic spots’ online virtual tourism. With the rapid development of information and network technology such as 5G, even the future 6G, the online virtual tourism is embracing new opportunities, which will for sure bring about great development of new industries and businesses of the online virtual tourism. The future direction of online virtual tourism is: 1) Online products are becoming more and more realistic and high-definition; 2) Tourist market is becoming more and more popular and pluralized; 3) Product content is becoming more and more diversified and demassified; 4) Display platform is becoming more and more shared and universalized.
Through the literature analysis of ‘geopolitics’ in Chinese core academic journals and books from 1982 to 2019, this paper investigates the different understanding of concept and research paradigm related to ‘geopolitics’ in two different disciplines, geography and politics. It mainly has two conclusions. First, there are many similarities between the two disciplines’ understanding of ‘geopolitics’, including the joint attention to the concepts of ‘geo-strategy’, ‘critical geopolitics’ and ‘emotional geopolitics’, the joint discussion on the issue of ‘security and rise of big powers’, ‘regional geography’ and ‘energy geopolitics’, as well as the common emphasis on case analysis and qualitative analysis methods in the analytical framework. The second is that the two disciplines also have their own characteristics. For example, in the discipline of geography, it has derived the concepts of ‘geo-environment’, ‘geo-economic’ and ‘geo-culture’, while the political science also discusses the notions of ‘geo-security’, ‘currency politics’ and ‘intelligence geopolitics’. Moreover, geography has more spatial and systematic thinking on issues, preferring the topics such as marine geopolitics and major international projects, while political science emphasizes current affairs and focuses on analyzing current affairs politics and the behind geopolitical logic. Furthermore, on the analytical framework, geography is deeply influenced by the measurement revolution, with which both qualitative and quantitative analysis are concerned, while political science is more dependent on case study and qualitative analysis. These similarities and differences, on the one hand, indicate that the current division of discipline does not completely change the fact that ‘geopolitics’ originates from the same source while on the other hand, it also points out that these differences are the key to the formation of current disciplinary boundaries. By examining the mainstream genealogy of ‘geopolitics’, this paper attempts to clarify an interdisciplinary ‘geopolitical’ research system, in order to serving for the country’s development and social progress.
Since the reform and opening up policy in 1978, China has experiencing a dramatic economic growth and urbanization process which helped the coastal region embedded in the global production network. Coastal metropolitans such as the Pearl River Delta (PRD) cities are shifting from ‘industrial economies’ to ‘service economies’. The advanced producer services play a key role in the development of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Hong Kong is adjacent to the PRD, which formed the industrial spatial pattern ‘Front shop, back factory’. Many Hongkong-funded service companies choose to set up branches in PRD, they tend to locate in regional hub city such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In this context, understanding the diffusion mechanism of service industries across institutional boundaries is important to the integration of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Based on the points of interest (POI) data and GIS, using the methods of nearest neighbor index, Kernel density estimation method and geographic concentration index, this study respectively analyzes the overall spatial layout and local characteristics of Hongkong-funded service companies in cities of the PRD. Then this study puts forward a multiple regression equation to reveal the influencing factors of location choices of these service companies. The conclusions can be drawn as follows: 1) The overall space of Hongkong-invested service companies in the PRD is concentrated, it has formed the spatial distribution feature of ‘overall dispersion and local concentration’. 2) The analysis by sub-industry shows that all service industries have differences in the spatial distribution. In addition to the spatial multi-center characteristics of the distributive service companies, other service companies have formed a spatial distribution structure with Guangzhou and Shenzhen as the core. Each kind of Hongkong-funded service companies in PRD cities has significant agglomeration characteristics. Among them, producer service company has the most prominent characteristic. 3) The development level of service industries and fixed asset investment are the main factors influencing the location selection of the Hongkong-funded service companies, but their influences vary depending on the nature of different service companies. In addition to distributive service enterprises, the development level of service industry has a significant impact on the layout of producer service companies, while consumer service enterprises and social service companies are mainly distributed in cities that are rich in fixed asset investment and service industry development level.
This article uses the Gini coefficient method to study the gap of the number of hospitals, health centers, the number of beds and the number of doctors per 10 000 persons in 41 cities of the Yangtze River Delta from 2007 to 2016 it also discusses the differentiation of the per capita health expenditure. At the same time, using data envelopment analysis method and the Malmquist productivity index model study the comprehensive efficiency and the total factor productivity index of health expenditure, and it also uses spatial autocorrelation model to analyze the Spatio-temporal evolution of efficiency. The research shows that: 1) The gap of indicators in the medical and health industry show a narrow trend in cities of the Yangtze River Delta, and that there are still some differences between different provinces. 2) The average of comprehensive efficiency in health expenditure is 0.720 which is not high from 2007 to 2016 in the Yangtze River Delta. The differences of the comprehensive efficiency among cities in the region are obvious, however the traditional developed cities are not high-efficiency agglomeratic areas. The agglomeration of high-high and low-low efficiency reflects in the initial year only, at the same time, the agglomeration effect weakens in the later period obviously. 3) The average of total factor productivity index is 0.842 which is drop with 15.8% annually. The phenomenon caused by the decline of technological progress mainly. The total factor productivity index shows different characteristics among different cities, the trend is rising overall meanwhile, the effect of spatial agglomeration weakens at the same time.
Significant changes have taken place in the regional development pattern in the era of high-speed rail. Based on the panel data of 13 prefecture-level cities in Hunan Province from 2009 to 2017, this paper uses the coupling coordination degree to measure the level of regional economic synergy, social network analysis (SNA) to analyze the evolution characteristics of the high-speed rail network, and Spatial Dubin Model (SDM) to test the influence mechanism of the development of Hunan's high-speed rail network to regional economic synergy. The results show: 1) In the era of high-speed rail, the spatial correlation of regional development increases in Hunan province, and the level of regional economic synergy rises steadily; 2) The gradual optimization of the high-speed rail network has a significantly direct positive effect on its own regional economic synergy, but an indirect negative spillover effect on other regions; 3) A “double-edged sword” feature of regional economic synergistic development has been produced due to the dual influences that the high-speed rail networks put on the structural coordination among interregional functions such as industry, market, transportation and innovation. In other words, we can say the high-speed rail networks has both positive and negative effects on those interregional functions which can also be explained by the Matthew effect. With the development of cities with high network centrality, the relatively disadvantaged ones on the edge may get the opposite result.
In the process of rapid urbanization in China, there has been the coexistence of urban growth and shrinkage, among which resource-based cities are more typical. The research on the process and influence mechanism of urban growth and shrinkage is helpful to optimize the development path of resource-based cities and the appropriate planning response. In this paper, we take Jixi City, Hegang City, Shuangyashan City and Qitaihe City in Heilongjiang Province as case cities. From the idea of urban comparative study, the process of urban growth and shrinkage of the four cities is quantitatively characterized and its factors are analyzed by means of mean square decision-making method and partial least square method. The advantage of using mean square decision-making is to avoid errors of subjective evaluation. The partial least square method has gathered the advantages of PCA, correlation analysis and MLR method. The aim to use PLS here is to solve the multicollinearity problem of variables. The results show that: 1) The four cities are not in a state of continuous shrinkage, but the growth and shrinkage alternately. This result is in line with the characteristic that the development of mining cities change with the mining market. 2) From the perspective of factors of urban growth and shrinkage process, Jixi City is mainly affected by residents’ income and consumption, Hegang City is mainly affected by industry and investment, Shuangyashan City is mainly affected by the manufacturing industry and investment, and Qitaihe City is mainly affected by coal production. The four cities have different influential factors mainly in aspects of social development, external investment, and industrial transformation. In addition, each factors has different influencing extend on different cities. Therefore, we will see that cities with similar resource endowment could have different influential factors on urban growth or shrinkage. 3) From the perspective of difference, the process of urban growth and shrinkage and the difference of influence mechanism are mainly determined by the difference of alternative industry selection, the competition between cities, and the external influence and other factors.
With the advent of the era of the knowledge economy, innovation has become a significant engine of economic development. In this context, China has recently experienced dramatic economic restructuring with its vision to transform its growth pattern into a knowledge-driven development. Meanwhile, innovation becomes an increasingly crucial issue in the realm of economic geography. Economic geographers of related research have focused on the performance of knowledge externalities in specific spaces. In recent years, apart from geographical proximity, the concept of nongeographical proximity (e.g., organizational proximity, social proximity, institutional proximity, and cognitive proximity) has also attracted the attention of scholars. Either geographical proximity or non-geographical proximity, their essences are to increase the interaction between the shareholders and high-tech enterprises and then generate knowledge spillovers. With the assumption of the technology spillover also brought by non-geographical proximity, high-tech enterprises might be able to acquire new knowledge and expand the diversity of their knowledge bases from the frequent interactions with the shareholders. Furthermore, fewer researches had focused on the effect of shareholders’ technological level on firms’ innovation performance brought by the extra linkage built by investment from external shareholders. In order to unravel the relationship between shareholders’ technological level and high-tech enterprises’ innovation performance, this research collects data from the online databases, including Tencent location service (https://lbs.qq.com/tool/getpoint/index.html), National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html) and Qichacha (http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html). By utilizing the data of 794 high-tech enterprises located in national high-tech industrial parks as samples, this article estimates the effect of shareholders’ technological level on innovation in the high-tech enterprise with a Tobit model within the framework of the knowledge production function. Based on the empirical evidence, this article proposes the three following findings: First, the average distance between the first shareholder and high-tech enterprise is 288 km. The shareholders are mainly distributed in the three core metropolitan regions (i.e., the Bohai Rim region, the Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region) in eastern China, and capital flows are mainly among or between these regions. Second, the shareholders’ technological level has a positive effect on improving enterprise innovation performance which is measured by the number of patents and software, because the investment behavior is conducive to enhance the convenience of technological interaction between shareholders and the high-tech enterprises. Third, the analysis of the technology spillover mechanism: the investment behavior lowers the threshold of interaction between the innovation subjects, and the technology spillover is realized through the establishment of a smooth flow of knowledge talents and a lower threshold for R&D cooperation. Finally, the article further affirms that capital flows can break through the spatial boundary and bring technology spillover, which provides a new way to facilitate the technology learning process of high-tech enterprises. Also, the following suggestions are put: With its limitation of attracting high-tech enterprises, local government can encourage local enterprises to introduce investment from enterprises with high technological level for promoting their innovation performance.
The relationships between human and nature, as well as development and environmental protection have become a major problem in the development of ethnic minority areas. Taking the Erhai Lake environmental governance issue in Dali,Yunan Province as a typical case, based on qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews and observation methods, this paper analyzes the bargain between subjects and negotiation of rights in environmental governance of Erhai Lake from the perspective of environmental justice and power game. This research finds that, environmental governance of Erhai Lake is a process of social governance and destination management in the name of the environment, which gradually extends from water environment governance to comprehensive governance of environment, people’s livelihood and economic upgrading. Erhaigovernance implies power tension and conflicts of interest. Based on the principles of reasonableness, rationality and legality, local residents, tourism operators and local government play power games and negotiate interests according to the logic of ‘emotion, rationality and law’. Environmental governance in rural tourism should be carried out within the framework of rural and social governance to take care of people’s livelihood and development. The theory of environmental justice can be used to explain the phenomenon of environmental governance and conflicts in rural tourism, and also provides a unique perspective for revealing conflicts of interest and social issues behind environmental governance.
This study uses linear regression model to explore the scale threshold of the prediction of social and economic activities by nighttime data (NPP-VIIRS) from multiple scales such as city, town, and grid in Guangzhou. The third national economic census data is the number of enterprises, employees, total revenues and assets of the enterprise. Furthermore, the research establishes 19 scales, applies Shannon’s information entropy and the index of dissimilarity to analyzes the different precisions of nighttime data in different scales to economic activities from the aspects of diversity, and the balance of industrial structure in the study area. The results show that the R2 of nighttime data and total revenues is 0.20 in 0.5 km scale. As the scale increases, the forecasting ability is more grounded. The predicted value in the town street scale is 0.63. It began to stabilize and R2 was 0.8 above 35 km scale. In addition, the industrial structure in the study area is characterized by unity and uneven development at a scale of 0.5 km. With the increase of the scale, the industrial structure in the study area has gradually become more diverse and balanced. The outcomes demonstrate that nighttime data can predict economic activities at various scales, and there still exist thresholds for the scale of prediction accuracy. This has guiding significance for understanding the regional industrial structure and optimizing the industrial structure of each region.
Green development efficiency is an indicator that is tied to economic growth and environment and severs as a useful instrument for sustainability analysis. This article estimates green development efficiency of 37 counties in restricted development zone of Jilin during 2011–2015 using slack SBM-DEA model which takes consideration of undesirable output. Then this article goes on to determine whether industrial agglomeration promote or impede the enhancement of green development efficiency in restricted development zone of Jilin by Tobit model. The results show that: 1) The average green development efficiency ranges from 0.5654 to 0.6705 during 2011–2015, which is at the medium level lower, and are following an upward path. Significant spatial differences exist in the green development efficiency in Northeast China. There are 7 counties, such as Lishu, Yitong, Changling, Ganan, Fuyu, Fusong and Antu in the green development state, and most of the other counties and cities are in a state of green development efficiency loss. 2) A U-shaped nonlinear relationship exists between industrial agglomeration level and green development efficiency and the inflection point is 1.257. The results concerning the industrial agglomeration level and its squared value reveal that green development undergoes a process of falling first and then rising as the industrial agglomeration reaches a high level. While green development efficiency tends to fall during the low level of industrial agglomeration, there comes a turning point when green development efficiency begins to increase as the industrial agglomeration level increases. 3) Industrialization and environmental regulation have no significant impact on green development efficiency. Control factors, such as economic development, urbanization, industrial structure, population carrying capacity, have different degrees of impact on green development efficiency, passing the significance test within 10% level. Economic development level and industrial structure are positively related to green development efficiency, while urbanization level and population density are negatively related to green development efficiency. 4) According to the analysis of effects of industrial agglomeration on green development efficiency, some corresponding policy implications are proposed in this article. The restricted development zone in Jilin Province should achieve the goal of improving the efficiency of green development by promoting urbanization, adjusting industrial structure, transforming economic growth mode, and guiding population carrying capacity.
Since the economic reforms and opening-up, the process of rural industrialization has led to the development of a large number of specialized towns which have significant implications for the Chinese economy. However, due to their labor-intensive, export-oriented and low-tech industrial structure, the economies of the specialized towns became fragile when the financial crisis in 2008 gave rise to a turbulent global market. Specialization of the towns, which used to generate significant effects of localization economies, shows its weakness in coping with the recession after the economic crisis. The sustainable development of the specialized towns in China emerges as an important issue requiring further scholarly enquiry. The newly developed economic resilience theory has provided a valuable and useful framework to explore the development path of the specialized towns, and the article has in turn served as an important empirical study for the theory at the town level. Economic resilience is associated with the capacity to withstand or recover from economic, social, and environmental shocks to its developmental growth path, or to transit to a new, sustainable one. One of the critical factors to shape economic resilience is the attribute of the industrial structure which can define a region’s ability to adjust and adapt to shocks. Despite an ongoing debate on the role played by specialization and variety, it is increasingly agreed that a greater economic diversity is related to a greater resilience of the economies. Based on the panel data of 32 specialized towns in Foshan City and a detailed case study of Xiqiao, a town specialized in textile, this article investigates the relationship between specialization, related/unrelated variety and economic resilience. The regression results suggest that specialization and related variety exert negative effects on economic resilience, whereas unrelated variety plays an active role. Our study supports the argument, which is well-documented in the existing literature, that specialization is more likely to be stuck in negative “lock-in” with adaptation. However, the effect of related variety is not as positive as expected. For low-level labor-intensive industries, their low technology level and weak cooperation among firms have seriously prevented efficient and effective knowledge exchange which is crucial for innovation and resilient ability. The Xiqiao case further indicates that effects of specialization and related variety on economic resilience are limited even the local government has actively intervened in promoting industrial upgrading through a series of approaches such as industrial park construction, labor training, subsidies and other preferential policies. Unrelated variety is conducive to foster the development of new industries, which can help to absorb unemployed labors caused by the shocks and maintain the resilience level. Thus, the specialized towns should consider an industrial structure of greater unrelated variety to boost necessary restructuring process and to engage in new growth paths.
From the perspective of tourism resource conversion efficiency, taking 18 key provinces along the ‘One Belt and One Road’ as the research target area, this paper applies the modified DEA model, Zou test and convergence test to explore the temporal and spatial variation rules and development trend of the tourism economic growth quality in 2008-2014 and 2014-2017 years two periods. The main contribution of this paper is to measure the conversion efficiency of tourism resources, which is an input factor. It overcomes the shackles that the existing literature only measures the comprehensive efficiency of tourism and cannot judge the conversion efficiency of tourism resources, and provides a new perspective for the study of high-quality development of tourism economy. The results show that: 1) In the past ten years, the average efficiency of tourism resources transformation in the 18 key provinces was only 0.312, far from the forefront of production, which further verifies that the development of China's tourism industry was still in the extensive growth mode of factor expansion, and the high-quality growth mode driven by efficiency had not yet formed. 2) After Chow test, it confirmed that 2014 was the mutation point of the time series of tourism resources conversion efficiency in the 18 key provinces along the ‘One belt and one road’, which provides a quantitative basis for the ‘One Belt and One Road’ initiative to enhance the transformation efficiency of tourism resources in various provinces. 3) From the perspective of space, in the past ten years, the development of tourism resource conversion efficiency in the provinces of the opening-up leading area, the external window area, the strategic fulcrum area and the core area of the silk belt had been unbalanced, with the average of 0.348, 0.311, 0.299 and 0.291, which were all at a low level of development and far from the forefront of production. 4) There were
Urban spatial expansion is the external mapping of urbanization process, urban external form and spatial structure change. The study of urban spatial expansion, especially the urban spatial expansion in the rapid urbanization stage, can help reveal the characteristics, rules and driving mechanism of urban spatial evolution, and provide theoretical basis for urban planning and construction. Based on Landsat remote sensing image data of Jinan in 1992, 2000, 2010 and 2018, ArcGIS and ENVI image analysis tools were used in this paper.This paper by extracts the built-up area of Jinan city, explores the spatiotemporal change process and characteristics of the spatial expansion of Jinan city from the aspects of expansion speed, intensity, fractal dimension, compactness, and center of gravity transfer. From the aspects of natural location and social economy, factors that may affect urban space expansion are selected, The study analyzes the driving force of the spatial expansion of Jinan by using the geographic weighted logistic regression.The results show that: 1) The urban space expansion in Jinan experienced three stages: ‘medium-strength and low-speed’, ‘high-strength and medium-speed’, and ‘low-strength and high-speed’, The external shape of the city tends to be stable, and the urban shape presents a strip pattern of east-west distribution with poor compactness. 2) Jinan urban space expanded most significantly towards E, NEE and NE in 1992 to 2018. The expansion mode was dominated by extension expansion and internal filling, and the center of gravity of urban spatial distribution shifted significantly to the east. 3) The spatial expansion of Jinan is affected by multiple driving factors, the main driving factors are distance from the built-up area of the city, distance from the main highway, Gross Domestic Product, urbanization rate, population density. The driving mechanism of each main driving factor is different.The closer the area is to the urban built-up area, the higher the radiation degree of urban social and economic activities will be, and the urban space expansion will be more likely to occur. The construction of transportation infrastructure is conducive to increasing the intensity of land development along the routes, accelerating the process of urbanization, accelerating the expansion of urban space, improving the efficiency of resource allocation and driving the development of surrounding areas. To some extent, the economic development of Jinan depends on the input of urban land resources, which have higher land use value and actual output capacity. The agglomeration of population increases the bearing pressure of urban space in Jinan, and urges the city to expand its own space to meet the land demand brought by the increase of population density. 4) Compared with other provincial capitals, Jinan has a relatively small scale of urban space expansion and has not yet formed a multi-center urban space structure. The centrality of the eastern and western urban areas is not obvious, and the central urban area bears great pressure, the effect of ‘northern span’ is not significant. In the future, Jinan needs to build an urban spatial structure of ‘group layout and multi-center support’ on the basis of the existing strip spatial expansion.
Today, affected by the transformation of China’s rural development mode, rural social relations are being reconstructed from many aspects, which includes not only rational improvement but also problems such as ‘constructive destruction’ and ‘disintegration of rural social structure’. Due to the dialectical unity of social relations and spatial forms, the alienation of social relations will cause changes in spatial forms, which contributes to the two main research purposes of this paper.The first is to comb the development process of rural tourism and explore the interactive relationship between economic development and social transformation by means of social networks. The second is to explore whether there is a correlation between social relations and spatial changes by investigating and recording the process of spatial change in the countryside, so as to reveal the spatial effects brought about by the evolution of social relations.To this end, following the continuous follow-up investigations of the beautiful countryside of Nanjing Shiwataoyuan village (Hereinafter referred to as Shiwa Village) in 2014, 2016, and 2018, this paper calculates each social network parameter index via social network analysis methods and analyzes the interactive process of rural economic and social space from 2012 to 2018 in detail. The results indicate: 1) The development of the selected rural social network conforms to the development law of the interaction between social capital and the market system, and has three distinct stages: substitution effect stage, crowding-out effect stage and complementary effect stage; 2) The network model evolves from the wheel and axis model to the ‘structure hole’ model and then to the cooperation and faction model, which corresponds to the diffusion, branch and cluster network structures respectively, accompanied by the elimination of actors and the enhancement of market economic rules; 3) Spatial reconstruction is mainly manifested in the reconstruction of land use pattern and the decline of rural space, during which process a dominant operator area, a marginal agglomeration area of aborigines, a foreign operator area and a spatial recession area are accordingly formed.
The internal coordination of tourism urbanization is the key to sustainable development. Based on coupling coordinative interactive mechanism, the coupling coordination model is used to analyze the spatio-temporal pattern and influencing factor of tourism urbanization of 17 counties in the Dongting Lake region from 2000 to 2018. The results showed that: 1) The temporal features of coupling degree and coordination degree had increased synchronously for 20 years, both presenting the characteristics of fluctuating ups and downs. The average coupling degree reaches 0.526 2 that was in the high coupling phase, and the average coordination degree reaches 0.434 4 that was in the intermediate coordination stage. In the phase characteristics, coupling degree went through 2 phases of middle coupling and high coupling; coordination degree went through 3 phases of low coordination, middle coordination and high coordination. While the change of coordination degree lagged behind the change of coupling degree, which indicated that there was still room for the increase of coordination degree. 2) The spatial pattern of coordination degree and coupling degree both presented the characteristics of low in the middle and high around. In the past 20 years, there were 4 coupling type with low coupling, medium coupling, high coupling, and 3 coordination type with low coordination, medium coordination and high coordination. In the 2 typical years, the coordination degree and coupling degree of 17 counties showed different types of transformation. The counties of high-level coupling type and coordination type were concentrated in the periphery area of the Dongting Lake, represented by Yueyang City, Changde City and Yiyang City. While the counties of low-level were concentrated in the central area of the Dongting Lake, represented by Yuanjiang City and Nanxian City. 3) The spatial combination had a great difference between coupling and coordination types, there were 5 and 6 types respectively of spatial combination of coupling and coordination types in 17 counties in 2000 and 2018, and the number of counties transformed from low level to high level had reached 9. The spatial distribution pattern of combination types was basically similar to that of coupling degree and coordination degree. 4) Relative researches indicated that the main affecting factor of this kind of spatial differential distribution was the strong relationship between the coordination degree and the characterization of the development level of tourism, urbanization and environment. Therefore, the development of tourism urbanization in the Dongting Lake region should optimize a coordinative developmental mechanism for tourism, urbanization and environment, which plays the driving role of tourism, and consolidate the guarantee foundation for urbanization, and improve the supporting function of ecological environment. A series of corresponding measures will be used to promote internal coordination level of tourism urbanization, and achieve the synchronous development of coupling degree and coordination degree.
Recently, user-generated content with spatial inference such as the check-in data in social media has been used in disaster research and planning. The volunteered geographical information has been used in representing the spatio-temporal patterns of people’s response towards large-scale hazards. This study focus on a small-scale but repeatedly occurred hazard – rainstorms and associated floods (RF). RF has posed a tremendous challenge to urban resilience, especially for cities in developing countries experiencing rapid land use changes. Using the RF in Nanjing City as a case, Sina Weibo check-in data during July 1-21, 2016 was collected and their content were analyzed. Specifically, the RF-related keywords were compiled and used to identify RF-related tweets from background check-in records. Then sentiment analysis was applied to show attitude expressed in each FR-related keywords. Then, the public awareness index and public sentiment index were used for revealing the spatio-temporal patterns of pubic responses towards RF. Our findings show that: 1) Temporally, the majority of RF-related tweets were posted during the rainstorm period; within a day, the RF concern was most discernable during the morning and evening peak hours; 2) Spatially, high public concern towards RF was found in areas within the main city and three new districts; and the major transport hubs and new districts with low altitude and rapid urban construction in recent years showed a higher level of concern on RF; 3) Both the temporal and spatial analysis suggest that RF adversely influence people’s travel-related behavior the most. Based on the knowledge gained from this analysis, policy implications were proposed to increase the urban resilience towards RF covering both hardware and software parts. It is suggested that these critical facilities including drainage facilities and other underground infrastructure, transport systems, and communications systems require advanced planning and long-term maintenance, especially for new city districts and key regional and urban transport hubs. Furthermore, it is of significance that information management and easily accessible communication function well during the RF, making the government, industry and the general public well-informed about the ongoing situation. Methodologically, this study further confirms that social media data can provide valuable real-time spatial information on understanding people’s responses towards RF, which could be used by local governments in emergency management. To enhance urban resilience, a quick decision making based on collection and analysis of social media data could be a good example of the big data use in smart city development.
With the development of society and economy, the demand of land use is diversified, and the land resources are becoming more and more scarce, which makes the emergence of land use conflict inevitable. Land use conflict has aggravated the contradiction among economic, ecological and social benefit, and has become an important factor to restrict the sustainable utilization of land. Based on the analysis of land use change in the middle reaches of the Heihe River, this study used external pressure, vulnerability and stability to construct a model of land use conflict intensity, and then analyzed the temporal and spatial variation characteristics of land use conflict in the past 35 years. The results showed: 1) The spatial distributions of land use conflict intensity were different in different periods, but high conflict intensity concentrated in Ganzhou and Linze, where the human activities were active. The areas with high conflict were distributed around cities. 2) The changes of land use conflict varied significantly in different periods. From 1995 to 2005, the intensity of land use conflict increased obviously, with the most obvious increase in Ganzhou and Shandan. In 2005-2015, although the area of the increased conflict intensity was less than the previous period, the increased degree of conflict was higher than that in the previous period, especially in Minle and Gaotai. 3) Land use conflict was weakly correlated with natural factors, but it was strongly correlated with land use conditions such as roads and rivers, and had the strongest correlation with social and economic factors represented by population density and GDP. 4) The stage characteristics of land use conflict and land use change were consistent. 1995-2000 was the period of most drastic land use change, and 1995-2005 was the period during which the area of land use conflict increased the most. The growth of cultivated land and construction land was very active, resulting in the encroachment of ecological land. It reflected that the contradiction among cultivated land, construction land and ecological land was the main form of land use conflict in the middle reaches of the Heihe River. The results can be used as a reference for land spatial planning and sustainable land use management in arid areas.
The river channel of the lower reaches of the Yellow River has severely shrunk and the discharge capacity has been significantly reduced since 1990s, which directly affects the carrying capacity of flood-sediment and threatens the safety of flood control in the Yellow River. This article is based on the annual hydrology data of Huayuankou, Gaocun and Luokou gauging stations and the measured data of the river cross-sections before the flood season from 1965 to 2015, to reveal the response of channel cross-sectional shapes of the lower Yellow River to the incoming runoff and sediment. The variation of morphological parameters of typical cross-sections (cross-sections area, width to depth ratio, etc.) are mainly analyzed. In addition, the quantitative analysis of the relationship between channel morphological parameters and water and sediment conditions are made. The results show that the above-mentioned morphological parameters are closely related to the water and sediment combination and the previous cross-section shape, and there are significant differences in the adjustment of the morphological parameters of the three cross-sections along the river. The adjustment amplitude of channel width decreases along the distance, and the variation extent of braided reach is the largest, especially in 1986-1999, the most serious shrinkage degree of braided reach, followed by the meandering reach, and the smallest lateral adjustment range of straight reach. Affected by the early stage morphology, the adjustment modes of cross-section of braided reach includes both lateral broadening (shrinking) and vertical deepening (silting); The ratio of width to depth is weakly positively related to the discharge in the meandering reach, and the channel mainly adjusted by lateral and vertical migration; while the width depth ratio of straight reach has a negative correlation with the discharge, and has a positive correlation with the sediment inflow coefficient. The adjustment mode is mainly silting (scouring) in the vertical direction.
The climatic characteristics of precipitation in North China were reflected from the aspects of precipitation, precipitation intensity, precipitation days and precipitation contribution rate based on the homogenized precipitation data of 84 meteorological stations from 1961 to 2017 in North China. The results showed that the annual precipitation in North China decreased at a rate of 3.2 mm/10a from 1961 to 2017, which was mainly due to the decrease of summer precipitation, on the contrary, the precipitation in winter, spring and autumn increased. The trend of precipitation in the area with high precipitation value was decreasing, while that in the central and western regions and the northeast showed a weak increasing trend. The precipitation intensity showed an increasing trend, reaching the maximum in the 1990s and the 21st century (2011-2017), and the precipitation intensity in most areas had increased. The number of days and contribution rate of light rain, storm rain and heavy storm rain were decreasing, while those of moderate rain and heavy rain were increasing. The areas with decreasing precipitation days were mainly concentrated in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei-Shanxi region, which were 34-42° N and 110-120° E. By analyzed the contribution rate of different levels of precipitation to the spatial distribution of North China, we could knew that the contribution of light rain to the precipitation in the western part of North China was the most important, and the contribution of heavy rain, storm rain and heavy storm rain to the precipitation in the southeast part of North China was the most important, which further explained the fact that the decrease of light rain, storm rain and heavy storm rain and the precipitation of above magnitude resulted in the decrease of the total precipitation in the western and southeast part of North China. The research on the characteristics of precipitation climate in North China can provide scientific support for regional climate change, rainstorm, drought and other disasters.
