China's Geography: Globalization and the Dynamics of Political, Economic, and Social Change, Fourth Edition

by Gregory Veeck

Despite China's clear and growing importance on the world stage, it remains often and easily misunderstood. Indeed, there are many Chinas, as this comprehensive survey, the most current and authoritative introduction available, vividly illustrates. Now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, this text traces the changes occurring in this powerful and ancient nation across both time and space. Beginning with China's diverse landscapes and environments, and continuing through its formative history and tumultuous recent past, the authors show contemporary China as a product of both internal and external forces. They consider historical and current successes and difficulties, including economic, political, cultural, and environmental challenges, while placing China in its international context as a massive, developing, diverse nation that is meeting the needs of its 1.4 billion citizens while becoming an aggressive major regional and global player. Through clear prose and 160 insightful maps, tables, and photos, China's Geography illustrates and explains the great economic, political, and social differences found throughout China's many regions. Accompanying the book is a companion website that provides a wealth of additional materials, including sample lectures, color versions of all the graphics, time series and provincial data files for student projects in Excel, lists of favorite films and websites, and public domain maps for student use.

432 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2006

Reviews

[Elizabeth van Niekerk-Venter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book with a student. He is Upper intermediate level English so the book was a little hard for him, thus it took as six months to finish. It was a really interesting book, though, and I wish I had read it when I still lived in China.

[Britt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I give this book two stars because the two star description is "It was ok" and the three star description is "I liked it," and although it wasn't horrible (or even that bad, really), I didn't actually like it... so two stars it is.

I recognize the value in having a basic textbook on China's geography and a book like this is something that was missing from the field for a long time. That said, the sociology and anthropology volumes on contemporary China pretty much got the job done and though the Veeck et al book claims to be about "China's geography" the only backing for this seems to be a sprinkling of the phrase "spatial reordering" throughout the book. Basically, it tries to use the vocabulary of geography but because it is so sweeping a volume it fails to go into depth about any of the key issues and I wonder if the gross over-simplication could do more harm than good to students unfamiliar with present-day China. On the other hand, perhaps it provides a good starting point for delving deeper into the big issues. I suppose it depends on the audience and how much room there is to follow up on some of the problems or gaps in the book.

Two peeves (of several) I will share :
1) Why is half the chapter on political geography devoted to a discussion of statistics on ethnic minorities? This is not to say the ethnicity is not an important political issue in China, but the authors seemed to use up a whole lot of space on it that could have been spent on other (in my view, more pressing) political geography issues that were entirely ignored.

2) The authors seem to be really in love with the Chinese Communist Party. Who knew that people are now free to move around the country to seek work wherever they want or that local people now have an actual say in politics? The authors even adopt the CCP's language, referring to the Chinese people as "the masses." This might be a weird thing to criticize and while I'm not a democratic crusader, wouldn't "the public" be a better term?

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my introduction to studying China. I'm much more interested in the human geography side which may explain why the soil chapter was dull. The chapter about culture would have been tedious too (it seems like I'm not set out to be a film studies student either) apart from it mentioning a number of interesting books and films to watch.

Most of the book was reasonably informative in depth given its scope.

The 3 chapters at the end were all very enjoyable summaries of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

[Heather Mcnulty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Informative but too dense and no main points.