Book Reviews: The National Economic Atlas of China

Summary

This review evaluates *The National Economic Atlas of China*, a landmark volume in China’s National Atlas Series published in both Chinese and English. The purpose is to assess the atlas’s structure, data foundation, cartographic methods, and overall scholarly value for understanding China’s restructuring economy during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The review systematically examines the atlas’s 265 maps, which include national maps at scales of 1:9 million to 1:20 million, regional maps of provinces, and supplementary explanatory notebooks. It highlights the atlas’s compilation from extensive official data—over 100 million bytes—integrating the 1985–1989 Industrial Census and the 1982 and 1990 Population Censuses, and employing GIS techniques for data processing and interactive computer-assisted cartography. Key findings underscore the atlas’s remarkable spatial coverage of China’s industrial, agricultural, transportation, commercial, and demographic patterns, with 84 industry maps forming the core. The review notes that the maps offer an unparalleled cartographic portrayal of China’s economic geography, although some multivariate representations are dense and challenging to interpret, and quality control issues appear on an introductory map. Minor gaps include incomplete mapping of sparsely populated western regions and the absence of post-1990 data. Overall, the atlas is judged as a masterly synthesis of accurate and comprehensive economic spatial information, making it an indispensable reference for sinologists, geographers, and policy researchers. The review concludes that, despite minor flaws, the atlas stands as a standard cartographic resource on socialist China’s reform-era economy, commendable for its scholarly rigor and cartographic craftsmanship.