owen lattimore – inner asian frontiers of china
Tag Archives: Geography
savage formosa
National Geographic is one of those magazines like good chocolate I get breathless over when each new issue arrives in the mail, but secretly suspect of being the vanguard of right-wing colonialist loons reminiscing into afternoon gins about the innate superiority of the British East India Company, and so have a kernel of guilt every time I sniff its glossy pages, a post-modern resentment for its educating me.
The View From Taiwan is one of currently 160 blogs I subscribe to, and has similarly educated me as well as making me homesick for Taipei, 18 months since I left. A week ago, he scanned the March 1920 issue article, Formosa the Beautiful
national geographic – formosachina’s changing landscape
The first time I took the KCR train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou I thought I’d arrived in Mordor. Endless grey dust-choked concrete skeletons of cement factories, prehistoric chimneys puking a sulphurous miasma that hung dead across the fields, killing sight of sky and horizon, and all signs indicating the work of constructing this local industrial apocalypse had just begun.
If there is one visceral image of China for me, it is not some quaintly exotic colonialism of pagoda’s or limestone spires rending shrouds of mist, it’s crossing the Zhujiang at San Shui under a thick undulating blanket of volatile smog and through the haze seeing the instruments of this catastrophe, ranked along the banks of the river and across the plains, the monstrous filthy bulks of the factories.
October’s Geotimes has a feature on the state of the environment in China, and what the future will bring in a continent-sized empire bent on the wealth of money at any cost.
“China has certainly almost every kind of environmental problem that’s been invented,”says Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute. But even though the country is using a lot of resources on the whole, usage is “extremely low”on a per capita basis, he says. “The United States is using 10 times as much oil per person.”If China approaches those rates, with 22 percent of the world’s population (versus the United States at 4.5 percent), then there will be reason to worry.
beijing car swamp
beijing crane forestguangdong #1
The centre of the manufacturing universe, Guangdong Provence now has the largest population in China. Bigger than most countries even it’s hit 110 million, with a migrant worker population in that total of 31 million, most of them in Dongguan and other salubrious holiday resorts. The figure doesn’t include illegal or unregistered migrants, so like the official population which just hit 1.3 billion, there’s probably a few million more swimming around the province.
Guangdong Province, one of the economic powerhouse in China, has replaced central Henan Province to become the most populous region in the country, Guangdong Provincial Governor Huang Huahua announced Friday.
The figure includes 79 million registered permanent residents and 31 million migrants who have lived in Guangdong for more than six months, Huang said at the on-going Third Session of the 10th provincial People’s Congress.
Elaborating the major reason for the change, Huang said that though Henan and Sichuan are the most populous regions in China, residents from the two provinces have come to Guangdong in recent years looking for jobs.
As the Pearl River Delta is now teemed with temporary migratory workers from elsewhere in China, acknowledged Huang, the provincial government will move some of them to the eastern and western parts of Guangdong and some mountainous areas.
Previously, Henan Province was China’s most populous region with a registered permanent population of 94.72 million.
guangzhou beautiful one day perfect the nextThe Other Path – Landscape Initiatives project
Geri Wittig presented an overview of the C5 Landscape Initiative project at Beijing’s China Central Academy of Fine Arts yesterday. The presentation came at the end of her trek of the Great Wall, gathering GS data for The Other Path
By creating a data model of this historically significant path we plan to develop a pattern matching search procedure for locating the most similar data model in the Landscape. Based on archeological geophysics C5 will use GPS, DEM and Spatial Imaging technology to create databases of the 3D character of the paths and a model of the environment in which they are situated. By searching various GIS databases C5 will identify the most similar terrain in California, on the tranverse edge of the Pacific Rim. A C5 team will be dispatched to collect data and documentation from both the originating path in China and the other path in California using 3D-image capture and GPS measurement data. The installation will include interactive computer visualization of the paths, comparative analysis of the matching terrain models, photo and video documentation and 3D-object fabrication of the paths as sculptural objects.
Landscape Initiative – The Other Path