print | close Where To Begin . . . Teacher's Guide to China's Geography

As a first step towards understanding the complexity and diversity of China, time spent with maps in order to examine geographic themes and issues will provide a useful framework for later efforts. Geography, of course, is more than learning bare-bones facts about where places are and the locating of place names on blank maps. Educated individuals see that Geography indeed is more than a Jeopardy category, more than a mere collection of isolated factual information about places. Certainly places and associated facts are absolute fundamentals in geographic literacy but they only take on their full significance once they are examined within a broader geographic framework - what geographers call "spatial context" or "spatial perspective."

To think geographically involves inquiring why things are where they are and how they came to be that way, the "where?" and "why there?" aspects of intellectual inquiry that link the essentials of time (history) and space and place (geography). Through such efforts, students and others are able to begin to perceive spatial patterns and spatial associations, even spatial order, among the "facts" they observe in natural as well as cultural landscapes. Maps as well as aerial photographs and satellite images--many of which today are available in computer-based geographic information systems/GIS - are critical tools in helping all of us visualize the Earth's spatial patterns and associations.

Geography for Life: National Geography Standards elaborates on the essential geographic subject matter, skills, and perspectives that students should acquire logically and coherently during their education from Kindergarten through the twelfth grade. As American students fulfill the expectations of the National Geography Standards over the next decade, a base will be established for lifelong learning about the web of geographic relationships that link us all to environments near and far, including those of China.

Geographers look at China and its constituent regions, as well as the world at large, not simply as physical or natural environments but as humanized places. Over four millennia, the Chinese people have modified their physical environments in ingenious and sometimes unique ways; some effort will be expended here to illustrate the domestication of space in creating humanized places. The Chinese, like others, have spatially shaped and structured their portions of the Earth's surface in ways that are represented best on maps. Where? is an appropriate perspective to begin our excursion into understanding China.

This brief introduction to China's geography using maps is only suggestive of the ways in which Geography as a discipline can help illuminate the spatial characteristics of a broad range of historical and contemporary topics and issues in the Chinese context:

• human-environment interactions
• environmental degradation
• marketing and social systems
• ethnic conflict
• resource management
• regional economic development
• internal and external migration
• international trade
• political ecology
• landscape analysis
• environmental perception
• cultural diffusion
• boundary formation
• rural and urban land use