Economic Geography of Modern China
Edited by: Wu Songdi and Dai An’gang
Publisher: East China Normal University Press

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The nine-volume Economic Geography of Modern China, completed in 2017, is the product of arduous work by 25 scholars over the past 10 years. It portrays a magnificent picture of the economic changes in modern China (1840-1949). The first volume gives an introduction to and general picture of China’s economic modernization. The other eight volumes are dedicated respectively to specific situations in eight regions, including the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai Area, Central China, Southwest China, South China, Fujian-Taiwan Area, North China and Mongolian Plateau, Northwest China and Northeast China. Each of these eight volumes studies the development, space distribution and regional difference of industries and economic factors.

This is the first multi-volume work that conducts a full, comprehensive and intensive investigation of the economic geography in modern China from the perspective of geography, economics and history. This new book has made two important breakthroughs. First, it elaborates upon the main characteristics and the formation of economic geography in modern China. It proposes that the differences between the eastern and western parts of China gradually became the most notable regional difference in modern China. According to the book, the early phase of China’s modernization shows a spatial process of spreading from the east areas of China to the west, and from coastal areas to inland China, and the geographical structure of China’s modern economy formed in the 1920s and 1930s.

Second, by using the theoretical framework of “Harbor-Hinterland and the spatial progress of China’s modernization,” this new set of books explains the momentum, direction, regional difference as well as its origins, of the economic transformation in modern China. The new book proposes a Harbor-Hinterland geographical structure of economic development in modern China which featured movement from the east areas of China to the west, and from coastal areas to inland China. This geographical structure is crucial to understanding the spatial process of China’s modernization, and also has profoundly influenced contemporary China.

The book also proposes seven viewpoints for further discussion. First, the difficult process of modernization is the main thread running through China’s modern history. Second, the coastal trading ports forced to open by treaties were the origins and major centers of regional modernization.  Third, the vast inland area also underwent great economic change. Fourth, the Harbor-Hinterland model was the major means for China’s spatial progress in economic modernization. Fifth, the import and export trade was the dominant factor facing the transformation of the traditional economy. Sixth, the influence of marketization, foreign-orientation in economic development and semi-industrialization should not be ignored. Last of all, there were notable differences among different regions during the process of modernization.

 

Feng Yuejian is a research fellow from the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

(edited by CHEN ALONG)