Book Reviews: The National Economic Atlas of China

Summary

This article is an academic review by Clifton W. Pannell of The National Economic Atlas of China (Oxford University Press, 1994), compiled by the Institute of Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions. As the latest volume in the National Atlas Series, the atlas was published bilingually and systematically depicts the spatial patterns of China’s reforming economy in the late 1980s. The review outlines the atlas’s compilation background, data sources, cartographic techniques, and structural coverage, noting its treatment of resources, agriculture, industry, transportation, commerce, urban construction, and education. Using GIS and computer-assisted mapping, the project processed about 100 million bytes of data. The author highly commends the atlas as an unprecedented spatial portrayal of China’s transitional economy and regards it as a standard reference for studying China’s economic geography. Meanwhile, he points out some flaws, such as inconsistent areal mapping units in sparsely populated western China, overly complex multivariate maps, and occasional registration or color anomalies, but overall affirms the atlas’s scholarly quality and craftsmanship.