Book Reviews: The National Economic Atlas of China

This review evaluates The National Economic Atlas of China (1994), a landmark reference work created through collaboration among major Chinese planning, geography, statistics, and information agencies. Originating in the national atlas project proposed in 1958, the volume represents the most comprehensive English-language cartographic account of China’s economy then available. It contains 265 full-color maps, supported by four handbooks, and organizes its material into ten sections covering resources, population, the general economy, agriculture, industry, transportation and communications, construction and environmental protection, commerce and finance, social services, and provincial economies. More than 500 variables are mapped for nearly 2,833 county-level units, providing unusually detailed evidence on China’s regional economic and social geography. The reviewer particularly commends the atlas’s production quality, cartographic clarity, interagency data integration, and innovative synthesis of multiple variables, as illustrated by maps of electricity networks, grain flows, port capacity, waste disposal, foreign trade, and coastal investment. Several limitations are also identified: sources for underlying statistics are often omitted; maps of overall or sectoral per capita income, poverty, and food relief are absent; some social indicators are presented as absolute totals rather than population-standardized measures; and a few variables lack adequate definitions. Despite these shortcomings and the practical risk of separating the accompanying booklets from the volume, the atlas is judged indispensable for research libraries. It offers both an authoritative overview of China’s economy and a powerful basis for investigating spatial inequality, uneven development, and coastal–interior tensions.