Land use is a complex system comprised of diverse natural and human elements that reflects the interaction and correlations between human beings and nature (Wu, 1991; Cai, 2001). As the famous Chinese human geographer Wu Chuanjun emphasized, land use describes the landscape’s embodiment of the relationship between human beings’ production activities and scientific research and the natural environment (Lu and Guo, 1998). Land use has become a central focus in research on the human-land relationship in Chinese human geography. By the end of 2017, the NSFC had funded 183 land use research programs within the broader framework of human geography, with total funding at 72.59 million yuan. The number of programs funded and the funding amount accounted for 20.7% and 14.3% of all land use research programs in the geographical sciences, respectively. Research in these programs has focused on the urbanized areas in China’s eastern coastal regions, ecologically vulnerable areas in northwest China, and rural areas in central and western regions of the country. Meanwhile, research topics corresponded with the international LUCC (Land-Use and Land-Cover Change) project, including: (1) characterizing the processes and patterns of land use change with remote sensing and GIS; (2) revealing macro- and micro-level human factors that drive land use change, including urbanization, population growth, resource development, transportation development, tourism development, agricultural policies, and farmers’ actions; (3) evaluating the environmental and social effects of land use change, such as on water and soil systems, regional climate, ecosystem services, carbon emissions, food production, and farmers’ livelihoods; and (4) exploring institutional dynamics of and measures for regulation of land use and environmental conservation. To a large extent, these projects followed the line of inquiry proposed in Wu’s notion of regional human-land relationships, which sees land use as a specific system of human-land relationships and suggests the investigation of the system’s formation, structure, and regulation (Wu, 1991).

Interdisciplinary methods are needed in research on land use change because it involves both natural and human factors. The typologies, structure, functions, and mechanisms of land use change are highly complex (Cai, 2001). The NSFC has supported and encouraged interdisciplinarity in land use research. As shown in Table 3, 59% of funded programs selected application codes denoting collaborative research, with 42% going to interdisciplinary projects (i.e., human geography and other disciplines) and 17% to intradisciplinary projects (i.e., two or more subdisciplines of human geography). Interdisciplinary programs appear to be more easily funded, as these increased from five in 2000-2004 to 29 in 2005-2009, and then to 58 in 2010-2014. The disciplines most often working in collaboration with human geographers included Integrated Physical Geography, Natural Resource Management, Regional Environmental Quality and Safety, and Geographical Information Sciences (GIS) (Table 3). Programs intersecting with GIS focused on the analysis and simulation of the processes, patterns, and evolution of land use change; programs intersecting with Regional Environmental Quality and Safety examined the ecological effects of land use change; and programs intersecting with Integrated Physical Geography engaged in comprehensive research of the driving factors, environmental effects, and control models of land use change. Land use is thus one of the main research topics in which human geography intersects closely with physical geography and GIS, reflecting a more general trend in the discipline towards interdisciplinary and integrative research—a trend that will likely continue (Fu et al., 2015).

Another feature of land use research in Chinese human geography is that greater attention has been paid to rural geography. About half (46%) of the funded land use research programs identify their projects with rural geography. This development illustrates Wu Chuanjun’s influence on Chinese human geographers, given his advocacy for research on land use from an agricultural geography approach (Liu, 2008). For the past three decades, the NSFC has supported a batch of researchers who have been particularly influential in their work on land use (Leng et al., 2016). For example, early in the development of Chinese human geography, She Zhixiang, from the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), received NSFC funding to examine the relationship between land use change and agricultural production in the Yangtze River Delta region, which provided policy insights for sustainable water and soil resource use and agricultural development (She and Luo, 2007).

Two main land use research teams currently operate with support from the NSFC (Table 4). The first is led by Liu Yansui and Long Hualou at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS. With support from three Key Programs, nine General Programs, and five Young Scientists Fund programs, the team has conducted systematic research on the processes, driving mechanisms, effects, and regulation models of land use change in different types of regions, including agro-pastoral interlaced zones, the Huang- Huai-Hai Plain, and coastal areas. In particular, the team has focused on rural hollowing, arguing that the abandoned village is a spatial form of the evolving rural system. Their work has revealed evolutionary characteristics and driving mechanisms of rural hollowing across regions, evaluated the social, economic, and environmental harms of hollowing, and proposed policy models for renovating hollow villages (Long et al., 2009; Liu and Liu, 2010). Methodologically, the team uses large-scale and high-resolution remote sensing data and GIS tools to identify and map the distribution of hollow villages at the national and regional levels, while addressing the mechanisms driving rural hollowing through social surveys at the household and individual levels. The team has published influential papers in international journals and is well regarded internationally as representatives of Chinese rural geographers. Moreover, their research provides significant policy insights for sustainable rural development and urban-rural integration (Liu et al., 2016).

The other main land use research team is led by Huang Xianjin at Nanjing University. This team is well known for their research on farmers’ land use behaviors and change across diverse economic and institutional conditions in the Yangtze River Delta region. This team primarily uses social surveys and econometric models. At the macro level, their work has revealed that economic growth, population growth, and urbanization are primary factors that drive rural land use change. At the micro level, they have examined the effects of various regional economic determinants—for example, the agricultural product market, farmland market, and nonagricultural employment opportunities—on farmers’ land use behaviors and land cover change in rural China (Zhou et al., 2004; Zhong and Huang, 2012). Moreover, the team has examined the influence of various institutional factors, such as urban-rural land market integration policies and agricultural subsidies, on farmers’ land use behaviors and their arable land occupation (Huang, 2017). Their research provides valuable policy implications for more sustainable agricultural land use and the improvement of farmers’ income.

The concept of urban systems describes the set of intercity relationships generated via urbanization, while the concept of urban agglomeration refers to cities’ functional and spatial relationships within a specific geographic area. Both are key topics of urban geography research in China and have been supported by the NSFC throughout the 30-year period under consideration. From 1986 to 2017, the NSFC funded 122 research programs on urban systems and agglomeration research, with funding amounting to 92.55 million yuan. There are four main threads of progress that have been made in these research areas. First, influenced by research on the “global city” network that prevailed throughout the 1990s, how urban systems are understood has shifted from a hierarchical conceptualization to a relational model (i.e., a network). Second, with rapid urbanization in China, research has shifted attention from an administrative division-based provincial urban system to one based in economic linkages and agglomerations. Third, with national strategic attention being paid to uneven geographic development, research extended geographically from the eastern coastal areas to the interior cities of central and western China. Fourth, increasing concerns over ecological sustainability has prompted urban agglomeration research to extend beyond issues of spatial organization to incorporate environmental effects and governance.

Research on urban systems and agglomeration has become a core focus for Chinese urban geographers (Table 5). The group led by Zhou Yixing at Peking University is one of the most influential research teams currently operating with support from the NSFC. Zhou’s team has conducted successive and systematic research on the mechanisms that drive the evolution and performance of China’s urban systems. In the mid-1990s, with support from two General Programs, “The Index System for Chinese Cities” and “Liaoning Metropolitan Area,” Zhou challenged the accepted view of urban evolution, which at the time focused on city-size distributions, proposing instead the wavy circulative ascension model to understand the dynamics of China’s city systems (Leng and Song, 2005a). In a program titled “Spatial Structure of Chinese Urban System in the Condition of Opening-up” completed in 2001, Zhou proposed the notion of primary economic linkage and argued that urban planning should prioritize economic linkages between cities (Zhou, 1998). He created frameworks for evaluation of Chinese cities, considering them in the context of economic globalization and the growing network of global cities. This allowed Zhou to measure and analyze patterns in intercity linkages, focusing specifically on the flows of railway passengers, goods, air passengers, international trade, and information exchange (Zhou and Zhang, 2003). This research provided a broad theoretical basis for understanding urban agglomeration processes in China (Leng and Song, 2005a) and had a profound influence on his team members and other Chinese urban geographers. For instance, Wang Maojun, a former member of Zhou’s team and currently a staff at the Capital Normal University, has studied Chinese urban systems using Zhou’s patent network perspective for his last three General Program projects.

Beyond Zhou’s work, a number of research teams have been examining China’s urban systems, with geographic focus on the regions of Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and northeast China. The teams include: Xu Xueqiang at Sun Yat-sen University, Ning Yuemin at the East China Normal University, Gu Chaolin at Nanjing University (now at Tsinghua University), Lu Yuqi at Nanjing Normal University, and Wang Shijun and Xiu Chunliang at the Northeast Normal University. Together, these teams have contributed to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the spatial patterns and evolution of urban systems in China; the concept, function, spatial organization, and formation mechanisms of urban agglomeration; and theories and techniques for urban system planning (Xu et al., 1995; Lu, 2002; Gu and Pang, 2008; Ning, 2011; Wang et al., 2011). Several other scholars working independently or in smaller teams have also received funding to conduct urban system research and draw on a wide variety of approaches. For example, Yan Xiaopei received support from the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar to explore the rise of information industries and their effect on urban systems. Similarly, Yao Shimou and Jin Fengjun received support to examine intercity linkages within urban agglomerations from the perspective of transportation geography and, in particular, the impact that the high-speed rail system has had on the structure of urban systems, whereas Chen Wen explored cities’ integrative development modes from the perspective of regional cooperation.

Along with the globalization process, recent years have seen increasing research on non-Western approaches to globalizing cities in China and the emerging urban agglomerations in inner land of the country. One of the main research teams currently growing with the NSFC’s support is led by Xue Desheng at Sun Yat-sen University. This team focuses on the processes and forces that drive urban globalization in China. The team’s work has been critical of the extremely economy-centered approach of world city research in the Western literature and has set out to explore the diversity of world cities from historical, political, and cultural perspectives (Xue et al., 2010; Xue et al., 2014). At the same time, as a response to national strategies for coordinated urban development, an increasing number of programs funded by the NSFC have begun to conduct research on urban agglomeration in central and western China, such as in Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan, and Xinjiang provinces. The geographical expansion of research will continue to contribute theoretical and empirical insights for China’s urban systems and agglomeration.

Increasing attention has also been paid to environmental issues in recent years. The team led by Fang Chuanglin at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, has made great strides. Fang’s early research on environmental sustainability in arid regions provided a basis for his later research on the environmental effects of urban agglomeration. His first NSFC General Program, “Ecological Reconstruction and Sustainable Development of Arid Regions in Northwest China: A Case Study of Liangxi Region,” was approved in 1998 and focused on problems of resource constraint, ecological and environmental change, and sustainable urbanization in arid areas. In his second General Program, approved in 2009 and titled “The Mechanism and Ecological Impacts of Spatial Expansion of Urban Agglomeration and the Computational Experiment System for Compactness Regulation,” Fang turned to urban agglomeration research. In 2015, Fang, together with Zhou Chenghu from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Chen Liding from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, CAS, Gu Chaolin from Tsinghua University, and Li Shuangcheng from Peking University, successfully applied for the NSFC’s Major Program with the title “The Coupling Mechanism and Interactive Stress Effects of Urbanization And Eco-environment in Mega-urban Agglomerations.” Fang’s team developed a technical standard to define the geographical scope of urban agglomerations, analyzing the spatial patterns, compactness, and eco-efficiency of several such agglomerations in China. They asserted that the national urban agglomeration system in China could be characterized structurally by six central urban agglomerations, 23 big urban agglomerations, and a π-shape belt of urban agglomerations (Fang et al., 2005). They proposed a strategy of grading cultivation for urban agglomeration planning (Fang, 2015). Recently, the team used an urban energy metabolism method to measure the metabolic efficiency and environmental pressures of local coupling and tele-coupling between urbanization and the eco-environment in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei agglomeration (Fang and Ren, 2017), thus providing quantitative evidence for policies to address the dispersion of Beijing’s non-capital functions and regional coordinated development.

The NSFC’s research programs in economic globalization, informatization, technology innovation, high-speed traffic, and industrial clustering have examined the various factors that drive regional development in post-reform China. Lu Dadao at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, has conducted comprehensive research on the patterns, dynamics, and sustainability of China’s regional developments. Lu had previously developed the “pole-axis system” theory to explain the structure of regional development in China, providing guidance to national territorial development initiatives (Lu, 1986). More recently, with the support of two Key Programs titled “Comprehensive Research on the Geographic Basis for the Regional Development of China” and “Analysis of the Sustaining System of Economic Development in China and the Dynamics of Human-land System,” Lu has been committed to studying the coupling of geographical factors that affect regional development and the resource-environmental systems in sustaining regional economic development, the aim being to explore various approaches to coordinating human-land relations (Lu, 2002; 2015). Similarly, Liu Yi emphasizes the role of resource-environmental constraints on regional development in his Key Program titled “The Study of the Resource-environmental Basis of the Changing Human-land Relation in Modern China,” exploring the relationship between social wealth accumulation and the exploitation of resources and the environment. Fan Jie, with support from two Key Programs, took an integrated approach to explore theories of regional functions and models of land development to achieve a more sustainable balance between the natural ecosystem and human systems. He developed a technical method for defining regional functions, evaluating resources and environmental carrying capacity, and providing the theoretical basis for major-function-areas planning of China (Fan, 2007). He also developed a model of balanced regional development that considers economic, social, and ecological factors (Fan, 2015). These integrative studies on regional development have valuable policy implications for sustainable development and optimized land development in China.

Although regional development is a result of both natural and human factors, economic globalization and its elements—such as foreign direct investment (FDI), transnational corporations, and international trade—have become core research foci for economic geography, largely because China’s economic development over the past 30 years has been driven by foreign capital. By the end of 2017, the NSFC had funded 92 research programs on economic globalization, with total funding amounting to 46.56 million yuan. Li Xiaojian from Henan University was one of the first Chinese scholars to study foreign direct investment with support from the NSFC. From 1996 to 2002, he examined the locational characteristics of FDI and its influence on regional development in China (Li, 1999). This research was carried out under two General Program grants, “Foreign Transnational Corporations and the Development of Coastal Regions in China: A Case Study of Shanghai” and “The Study of Spatial Network of Large-size Sino-foreign Joint Ventures.” These research programs have proven extremely influential.

In the period since the 1990s, economic geographic studies of FDI have only increased, especially after 2001 when China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Several research teams have emerged with support from NSFC funding (Table 6). Wang Jici, from Peking University, has focused on the emergence and upgrading of export-oriented manufacturing industrial clusters in the context of globalization (Wang and Zhang, 2008). He Canfei from the same university has studied FDI’s geographical concentration, locational modeling, and technological spillover effect in China, examining the ways in which FDI influences regional development. He has argued that agglomeration effects play an important role in determining where FDI concentrates in China. His research thus makes valuable contributions to traditional investment theories and location-based approaches to the study of multinational corporations (He and Liu, 2006; He and Xiao, 2011). Liu Weidong, from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, has focused on the interaction between foreign enterprises and local institutional environments to consider the influence of FDI on regional development patterns in China. His concept of obligated embeddedness explains globalization as a process that must be embedded in local institutional environments, suggesting that the way a region benefits from globalization depends on institutional and knowledge innovation in the region (Liu, 2003; Liu et al., 2003). Du Debin, from the East China Normal University, has studied the agglomeration effects of, and knowledge spillover from, multinational corporations’ R&D practices (Du, 2005). Zeng Gang from the same university has examined the evolution of industrial clusters from the perspective of global value chains, revealing the influence of multinational corporations on local industrial upgrading (Wen and Zeng, 2005). These studies provide a reference for local governments to formulate regional development strategies in response to the forces of globalization.

With the promulgation of the “Belt and Road” international cooperation initiative and China’s outward FDI exceeding its inward FDI for the first time in 2014 (Zhang et al., 2017), China is seen to have entered a new phase of globalization, now characterized as “going out” or outward-facing (Liu, 2015). This periodization has raised new questions for Chinese human geographers. In the present context, the NSFC has increased funding for research programs studying outward FDI, international trade, geo-economics, and geopolitics. In fact, the NSFC had funded 12 such programs even before 2014, illustrating the foundation’s foresight in support of new research topics; after 2014, as a response to these broad shifts, the NSFC doubled its funding for such programs. This research focuses on the geographical distribution of China’s oversea enterprises, the modes of international cooperation in oil-gas resource exploitation, cross-border economic cooperation, and China’s geopolitical situation. As such, these programs have been instrumental in revealing new elements impacting China’s economic security and regional development in the present era. Hence, Lu Dadao and Du Debin’s research has shifted to geopolitics and geo-economics (Lu and Du, 2013), Liu Yi has recently become focused on world energy geographies (Yang et al., 2015), and He Canfei and Liu Weidong have shifted their research focus from FDI in China to China’s oversea FDI (He et al., 2016; Zou and Liu, 2016). To sum up, the NSFC has supported and encouraged economic geographers to engage in new research areas that reflect the circumstances of the present historical era, extending the subdiscipline’s role from the “bringing in” of FDI to now inform its “going out.”

Climate change is one of the most severe challenges facing human beings in the 21st century. It has become a crucial issue in academia and global society in general. Since China signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, climate change has attracted increasing attention from domestic scholars. The NSFC started to fund human geographers to engage in climate change research in 2000. Following the 2009 Summit on Global Climate Change in Copenhagen, the number of funded programs on climate change exploded, reaching its peak in 2013 and declining slightly thereafter (Figure 2). However, after China signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, the number of funded programs grew again, as reflected in the 2017 numbers shown in Figure 2. This implies, on the one hand, that human geographers have been able to develop immediate responses to national strategic needs, and on the other hand, that the NSFC conforms to trends in academic research and supports the expansion of human geography into new research areas.

By the end of 2017, the NSFC had funded 165 climate change research programs under the framework of human geography, with total funding amounting to 75.52 million yuan. Economic geography and urban geography are the two main subdisciplines engaged in climate change research (Table 7). In general, however, human geographers studying climate change focus on two key issues: the effect of climate change on, and adaptive responses of, human systems; and climate protection, carbon emissions and reduction, low-carbon economies, and low-carbon cities. The NSFC has supported human geography’s various subdisciplines to address these issues from several approaches. Economic geographers have been most concerned with measurement of carbon emissions to determine regional patterns and its driving factors; the impact of carbon-reducing policies on regional economic development such as carbon trading and the path of carbon emission reductions and their regional assignment. Environmental regulations, resulting from pressure to reduce carbon emissions, has given rise to a new interdisciplinary field, environmental economic geography. For their part, urban geographers have been attuned to the effects that urban forms and residents’ travel modes have on carbon emission rates, exploring low-carbon-oriented urban spatial structures. Social and cultural geographers have focused on measuring carbon emissions from the tourism industries, the effect of climate change on seasonal tourism products, and human systems’ responses to climate pressures. Rural geographers examine the effect of global warming on crop production and planting and study farmers’ adaptation behaviors in the face of climate change. Sustainable regional development studies have drawn attention to two aspects of these overall trends: how ecosystems such as hydrology, land cover, and agriculture respond to climate change, and the effectiveness of various carbon emissions-reduction mechanisms, such as carbon trading, low-carbon economies, and circular economies. These studies provide implications for policies promoting low-carbon economies, low-carbon urban development, and climate protection.

Climate change is still an ascendant field for human geographers in China. It is believed that the teams of human geographers engaging in climate change research under the support of the NSFC are growing up as 60% of funded programs were approved in the last five years. Nevertheless, a team led by Wang Zheng from the Institute of Science and Technology Policy and Management Science, CAS, and the East China Normal University is full-fledged. With support from six NSFC-funded programs, Wang’s team has made great progress in studying cooperative efforts to protect the global climate, the estimation and prediction of carbon emissions in China, carbon emission reduction policies, and carbon trading simulations. Based on model analysis, this team has argued that China would reach peak carbon emissions in 2040 at the rate of current technological progress and that carbon emissions from energy consumption would reach their peak in 2031 under optimal growth path conditions (Wang et al., 2010; Zhu et al., 2009). Based on a comparison of various carbon emission reduction schemes at home and abroad, they proposed a more reasonable global carbon reduction cooperation scheme on the basis of Pareto improvements (Wang et al., 2015). Their research provides a valuable reference for China’s international negotiations on carbon emission reduction.

The development of sociocultural geographies in China was shaped by twin forces. On the one hand, the rapid growth of China’s market economy has resulted in serious social problems, which have turned attention to the importance of social governance. Political, social, and cultural issues have thus gradually become research themes within human geography. On the other hand, influenced by postmodern social theory and criticism, Western human geography has undergone a so-called “cultural turn” over the past two decades, and this development has had significant influence on human geography in China. To keep apace of these trends in the discipline’s development, the NSFC set up an independent submission framework for sociocultural geography programs in 2008 as a way to support the emerging subdiscipline. Hence, the number of funded programs in social and cultural geographies increased from 7 in 1990-1994 to 77 in 2010-2014 (Figure 3). By the end of 2017, the NSFC had funded 197 research programs in social and cultural geographies, with funding amounting to 79.43 million yuan.

Overall, social geography in China has made significant progress in studying the structuring and restructuring of urban social spaces and the evolution of specific social spaces (e.g., international migrant communities, floating population communities, deprived neighborhoods). The first NSFC funding for a research program in social geography went to Wang Xingzhong from Xi’an International Studies University and was titled “Study of urban social spatial structure in the economic center of Xi’an City.” With the support of other two NSFC-funded programs, Wang completed research on living spaces in Chinese cities and a micro-locational analysis of commercial entertainment businesses. Specifically, he examined the structure of residential spaces in Chinese cities, the everyday living behaviors of residents, and the division of urban social space. Moreover, he developed a framework with which to evaluate quality of life at the level of urban communities and offered a theoretical basis for urban community planning in China. Wu Chuanjun offered praise for Wang’s work, commenting that he “developed a theoretical framework for Chinese urban social geography and filled up the gap of the under-researched area.” (Wang, 2000)

Another main social geography research team is led by Li Zhigang (now at Wuhan University) and He Shenjing (now at Hong Kong University), both at Sun Yat-sen University at the time the funding was awarded. The NSFC provided the researchers continual support, funding them with different program levels at different periods in their careers, including the Young Scientists Fund, General Program, and the Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Table 8). Li’s work focused on social differentiation, segmentation, and integration in Guangzhou’s ethnic enclaves, which include African and other new immigrant communities, revealing the roles played by institutions, market forces, and social networks in the production and reproduction of socio-spatial differentiation (Li et al., 2008; Li and Liu, 2011). He’s work was concerned with gentrification driven by urban redevelopment in Chinese cities. She examined the modes, processes, driving forces, and socio-spatial consequences of gentrification in urban China, revealing the importance of the state, market forces, and social factors in the restructuring of social space and transformations in urban China (He and Liu, 2010; He et al., 2012). Li and He have each published a number of papers in international journals and are well regarded internationally as representatives of Chinese urban social geographers (Leng et al., 2016).

The NSFC fostered the development of cultural geography in two ways. The first was to promote a transformation in traditional cultural geography as a response to new trends in cultural geography in the West. Traditional cultural geography in China was concerned with the types, distribution, formation, and evolution of cultural landscapes (such as talents, settlements, place names, and calligraphy) in specific geographical regions. The first NSFC program on traditional cultural geography was directed by Situ Shangji from Sun Yat-sen University under the title “The Study of Cultural Geography in Guangdong Province”. The NSFC then funded Deng Hui from Peking University, Zhang Weiran from Fudan University, and Liu Peilin from Hengyang Normal University to study the characteristics, formation, and evolution of cultural landscapes in other regions of China. With the exception of a few scholars who continue to pursue traditional cultural geography interests, most scholars have shifted to what is described as the new cultural geography, focusing on the sociality and spatiality of culture and the meaning of cultural landscapes (e.g., the values and power relationships that shape production of cultural landscapes). The number of funded programs under this new cultural geography framework increased from 0 in 1990-2000 to 89 in 2001-2017, whereas the number of traditional cultural geography programs funded during the same period only increased from 11 to 18.

An interesting example of this transformation is Zhu Hong from Sun Yat-sen University and the South China Normal University. Following his PhD supervisor Situ Shangji, he continued to study traditional topics in cultural geography and completed his first NSFC program on the formation of Hainan’s island culture in 2006. After this project was completed, however, he turned to new cultural geography research with support from the NSFC and focused on the interpretation of urban cultural evolution in the context of globalization, including immigrants’ development of a sense of place and cultural identity and how they engage in localized negotiations with other social groups in cities. Two main research teams are currently working in the new cultural geography tradition in China (Table 9). One is the team led by Zhu Hong, which focuses on issues of identity, sense of place, social construction, and the politics of culture. This team has published papers in high-level international journals in recent years. The other is led by Zhou Shangyi at Beijing Normal University and focuses on transformations in urban cultural space, the construction of locality, and the cultural adaptations of urban immigrants. In sum, the new cultural geographers have been committed to exploring the cultural and political meanings that attend the reconstruction of human-land relationships in modernizing and globalizing China.

The second way that the NSFC has advanced cultural geography is by facilitating intersections between traditional cultural geography and other disciplines. An example is the research team led by Liu Peilin at Hengyang Normal University (Table 9). Liu’s early NSFC-funded research had focused on the cultural landscapes of traditional settlements in South China. With continual support of the NSFC, however, Liu’s more recent work has made great strides in using GIS techniques and concepts from biology to activate and renew traditional cultural geography. These unique disciplinary crossovers helped Liu develop his concept of landscape gene and promote a GIS-based mode of protection for traditional settlements. Specifically, he developed a technique for the zoning of traditional settlement landscapes in China and provided a theoretical basis for a policy of “remembering nostalgia” in the context of new-type urbanization in China (Liu et al., 2010).