国际背景与中国特色的经济地理学

近一、二十年来,以英美地理学家为主导的国际经济地理学界开始注重制度和社会文化因素对经济空间现象的影响。柔性专业化、网络与根植性、集聚与集群,区域管制等概念,频聚出现于国际主导地理刊物和国际会议讨论之中。国内也有一些学者引进这些相关理论并结合中国实例作了一些可喜的探索。这种引进理论--中国实际研究--理论总结的研究模式,推动着上世纪中国经济地理学发展。但是,从中国特色的经济地理学角度考虑,还应该探索其他研究思路。中国经济地理学发展背景,有一些在世界十分独特,如最大的且近20多年经济增长最快的发展中国家,工业化与城市化不相一致,体制变革、文化传统的特殊影响,人口与资源的尖锐矛盾,区域差异巨大,经济地理学在地理学中地位的特殊性等。根据这些背景,中国经济地理学需要冷静地审视国际学术动向和中国特色。立足中国实际,加强国际交流,凝练解释中国特殊经济地理现象的理论观点,逐渐培育国际经济地理学界中的中国流派。

INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS AND ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

In recent two decades, the mainstream economic geographers in the world have focused their research on the spatial impact of institutional and cultural factors on economic development. The terms such as flexible specialization, networks and embeddedness, regional agglomerations and clusters, regional governance, cultural turn, and relational turn, have frequently appeared in the economic geography literature and international conferences. Bringing these ideas to China's studies, some Chinese economic geographers have published interesting papers.This may be named theory-borrowing approach, which follows the steps of borrowing theories, local case studies, and finding discussion. Chinese geographers have adopted such an approach over a century. How ever, the voice of Chinese economic geographers in international forums has still remained very weak. Is there a possibility for a new approach to promote more critical economic geography in China?Given the uniquely Chinese context for economic geography, this paper suggests a more local-focusing approach, which starts from research on the unique geographical facts in China, explaining the formation by using Chinese philosophy, and comparing the findings with other countries. China possesses many unique geographical phenomena that are worthy being studied academically.These include, for example, regional differentiation generated by fast economic g rowth, the dynamics of the relationship between population, resources and environment, and the local culture and enterprise clusters in rural China, etc. In addition, one should not ignore that economic geography in China has been strongly linked with physical geography. This contrasts Ang lo-American counterpart of social science orientation. Academic research needs scientific attitude and long-time hard working. There are some new trends that would do some harm to renovation of the theory in the study of economic geography in China. Therefore, it is more important to cultivate a group of leading scholars whose main aims are to build the basic theories of economic geography. Finally, the paper argues that the current theories used by geographers in developed countries may not suit China's context. China should produce her own theories in economic geography.