GIS-Introduction

This website offers various maps on Chinese prefectures and provinces in order to highlight the tremendous change in China's socio-economic structure during the past decade. The most important part of this site is devoted to the results of a project on China´s regional economic development that has been our concern since the early Nineties, first in the context of the "European Project on China's Modernization: Contemporary Patterns of Cultural and Economic Change" that was realized by Carsten Herrmann-Pillath together with the late, immemorable Helmut Martin (funded by Volkswagen Foundation 1990-1994).

We have struggled to continue that work without substantial funding until support by the Märkische Arbeitgeberverband provided the unique opportunity to rush wide steps ahead. Here we present applications of a unique (to our best knowledge) data set on Chinese prefectures (1993, 1998 and 1999) in the framework of the Geographic Information Systems technique. The data set, its scope and limitation is described in a separate paper on this website "Prefecture-level statistics as a source of data for research into economic disparities in China". The work has been realized by Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Daniel Kirchert and Pan Jiancheng. Ongoing work can be accessed in our section "discussion papers".

We wish to extend the data base into the past as well into the future. Soon, a separate data base on Chinese provinces and macro-regions will become available. So far, we only provide public access to the maps, because the organizational requirements for offering the data to the public are not yet existing.