Perspectives on Space and Time in US and Chinese Science - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 14

Large-scale field investigations of China's natural environment took place after
1949 in support of the rapid development of the agricultural and industrial sectors,
and geographical science achieved significant progress in the 1950s and 1960s. As
a result, a large number of maps at scales ranging from 1:4 million to 1:1 million
were produced for the entirety of mainland China. These include maps of geological
structure and mineralogy, soil, and physical geography. Large-scale topographic
maps at 1:10,000-1:50,000 were being produced for the eastern part of China. In the
meantime, relevant institutions developed rapidly in various levels of government.
By the 1970s, in addition to agricultural bureaus established in the 1950s and 1960s,
every county had a weather station, a hydrological bureau, and a forest bureau,
part of whose responsibilities were collecting weather, hydrological, and timber
data, respectively. Networks of weather observation, hydrological measurements,
and timber inventory were rapidly developed in support of weather forecasting,
flood and drought control, and planned timber production. In 1986, China began
its second soil inventory which led to the production of soil maps at three scales:
1:50,000 at the county level, 1:500,000 scale at the provincial level and 1:1 million
at the national level. However, due to poor archiving, many of the raw data of soil
surveys were lost. In the same year, China began to monitor environmental quality
in 113 selected cities under the administration of a newly established governmental
agency: the State Environmental Protection Agency.
Mineral, hydrological, weather, soil, forest, environmental, and many more
different types of data are collected directly under the coordination of governmental
agencies at various levels. With multiple regional research institutes in geography
and botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has completed several types of maps
at the national level since the 1980s. These include China's 1:4 million vegetation
map (Hou 1979 ) and the 1:1 million land use map in the 1980s (Wu 1990 ).
Geographic information systems gained popularity in the 1980s in the western
world, and Chinese scholars quickly followed the trend. A state key lab was
established in the Chinese Academy of Sciences on resources and environmental
information systems by Shupeng Chen as early as 1989. GIS has been quickly
included in university curricula. Now almost all geography programs in China
offer GIS courses and many universities have established GIS departments. A
large number of students specialized in GIS are employed in government agencies
at various levels and in the industrial sector. This has effectively facilitated the
digitizing of location-related data. Quick adoption of western concepts by Chinese
scholars is also exemplified by the organization of the first International Symposium
on Digital Earth in 1999 following the 1998 speech of Al Gore. In the following 9
years, the Chinese Academy of Sciences funded the International Society for Digital
Earth in 2006 and the International Journal of Digital Earth in 2008 (Goodchild
et al. 2012 ).
Since the 1990s, more detailed maps at the national scale have been made with
digital remote sensing. Land-use and land-cover maps at 30 m resolution have been
made every 5 years since 1995 (Liu et al. 2002 ). Wetland maps over the entirety of
China have been made for 1978 (80 m resolution), 1990 (30 m), 2000 (30 m), and
2008 (20 m) (Gong et al. 2010 ; Niu et al. 2012 ). Urban expansion maps at 30 m