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Origins and Evolution of a Geographical Idea: The Macroregion in China
Carolyn Cartier
Modern China 2002; 28; 79
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Cartier
MODERN
/ THE
CHINA
MACROREGION
/ JANUARY 2002
IN CHINA
Origins and Evolution
of a Geographical Idea
The Macroregion in China
CAROLYN CARTIER
University of Southern California
Questions about the evolution of paradigms in the academy are
intriguing because their development may reflect prevailing social
formations as much or more than new discoveries or truths, particularly in the humanities and in branches of the social sciences in which
epistemologies reflect how scholars choose to assemble and construct
knowledge. In the field of China studies, the situation is more complex; even while acknowledging debates over the social construction
of knowledge, historians of China have arguably treated paradigm
shifts as if scientific methods from the “natural sciences provide a
model of knowledge, research, and explanation” (Dirlik, 1996: 245).
But translating scientific theory into humanistic research creates particular epistemological problems for paradigm development. In area
studies research, epistemological divides between the disciplines and
area studies, as well as between empirical work and theoretical applications, can obscure a paradigm’s origins and complicate its evoAUTHOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the University of California, Los Angeles, Modern China Seminar, “Regions, Space, and Landscapes: Geographic
Approaches in China Studies” (13 May 2000). I would like to thank the organizer of the seminar,
C. Cindy Fan, and the seminar participants for comments on the paper. I especially thank Philip
Huang, Laurence J. C. Ma, and William Rowe for their careful reading of the manuscript and
extensive suggestions. Kathryn Bernhardt was particularly helpful during the review and publication process. The paper was originally drafted when I was at the University of Oregon, and I
am grateful to Cynthia Brokaw and Richard Kraus for engaging with preliminary versions of the
work. Conversations or correspondence with John Agnew, Kam Wing Chan, Bryna Goodman,
David S. G. Goodman, Tim Oakes, Peter Perdue, Gilbert Rozman, Helen Siu, Frederic Wakeman,
and Wang Di contributed important details to the arguments. Jane Sinclair executed the maps.
Alice Falk masterfully copyedited the manuscript.
MODERN CHINA, Vol. 28 No. 1, January 2002 79-142
© 2002 Sage Publications
79
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80 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
lution. The so-called crisis in area studies (see Rafael, 1994; Barlow,
1997; Abraham and Kassimir, 1997; Cumings, 1997a, 1997b; Scott,
1997)—the undermining of the nation-state as the dependable and
bounded unit of analysis, brought about by contemporary forces of
globalization, consequent dynamic local spatialities, and poststructural
and postmodern theoretical responses—makes bridging these divides
and formulating appropriate methodological approaches particularly
urgent.
This article examines the production in China area studies of one
paradigm, the macroregion, to demonstrate the importance of overcoming some of these epistemological problems. Its focus is on the
disciplinary origins of the theoretical material on which the idea of the
macroregion is based—geography. Here a paradigm, as Thomas S.
Kuhn (1970: 174-210) explained in response to critiques of his own
presumptions about paradigms, both represents communities of scholars and acts as a shared example—a “group-licensed way of seeing”—
from which subsequent studies evolve, studies that are simultaneously
suggested and limited by the theoretical assumptions of the paradigm.
To establish a basis for careful discussion, I first compare traditional
approaches in regional geography and economic geography with
disciplinary debates about those fields in the second half of the twentieth century. Debates concerning regional geography reflected and
in part led the contemporary “spatial turn”: that is, the trend in the
academy to use social theory engaged with the themes of space and
place.
I next explain the origins and evolution of the macroregion, as the
concept emerged as the dominant paradigm in Chinese historiography
for the study of regions. My analysis uses examples from the literature
of the south China coast because the “southeast coast” macroregion
was subjected to a focused historical study on which a final elaboration of the macroregion model was based (Skinner, 1985). The utility
of the macroregion approach has already drawn some debate (Sands
and Myers, 1986; Lavely, 1989; Little and Esherick, 1989), and my
analysis does not revisit those earlier concerns; instead, my arguments
are set against the backdrop of the programmatic goal among China
scholars to develop a “China-centered Chinese history” (Cohen,
1984), concentrating on the problems of Western-centric scholarship
to which that clarion call was a response. While some scholars have
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 81
viewed the macroregion model as a suitably “China-centered” approach, my arguments trace its derivation from theoretical approaches
in economic geography and Western area studies. Because the model
was originally conceived to account for the formation of a particular
geography (European economic landscapes) at a specific time (the
early industrial period), its suitability for China area studies raises
questions that a retrospective review of the scholarship should pose.
Of course the Western origins of the scholarship per se are not an
inherent problem; rather, how that theory has been interpreted and
applied in the Chinese case is what compels evaluation.
I conclude not only that the macroregion analysis of the southeast
coast did not, pace Paul Cohen (1984), “discover” local history but
also that this application foregrounded the significance of the treaty
ports and the dualisms of tradition and modernity characteristic of
what Esherick (1972) has labeled the “impact-response” approach to
Chinese historiography. While the macroregion model served to shift
attention from the imperial to the local level and to regional history,
and while it provided some alternatives to research perspectives dominated by modernization theory, promoted as the sole approach to
studying regional history, it has proved limiting: it does not aid in
understanding human processes and their variation that underlie
urbanization and regional formation, especially social and cultural
practices, long-distance trade, and associated economic activities.
Moreover, as my exploration of disciplinary geography demonstrates,
continued reliance on the concept of the macroregion has tied China
area studies to theoretical perspectives that have become outmoded in
geography; contemporary approaches in geographical analysis suggest promising avenues for future research.
TRADITION AND DEBATE IN REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY
In the middle of the twentieth century, regional geography joined
human-environment relations, spatial analysis, and physical geography as one of the leading fields in the discipline of geography
(Pattison, 1964). In the most general sense, regional geography is the
study of world regions: it is the area studies of geography. Its specific
concern has been regional differentiation, most typically on the
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82 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
national and the subnational scale. This field, now referred to as “traditional regional geography,” depended at mid-century largely on a
descriptive methodology focused on diverse and unique regional characteristics that produced regional coherence and regional meaning.
The approach paid attention to both human and physical environmental characteristics, thereby serving to bridge those two wings of the
discipline. A second stream of regional geography, or an analytical
geography of regions, which emerged in the 1950s with the new fields
of spatial analysis and regional science, has been devoted to theorizing
regional economies. By the 1970s, methodologies derived from social
theory began to displace paradigms rooted in spatial analysis; these
more contemporary theoretical approaches to explaining regional formation (discussed in a later section) have highlighted social processes, factors largely ignored by regional science paradigms.
Traditional regional geography emphasized chorology, a methodology concerned with the spatial patterning of diverse geographic
phenomena. Especially in the foreign area studies variant, it commenced with a descriptive accounting of the natural environment, followed by an assessment of patterns of human activities and characteristics; these usually included such categories as population and ethnic
group distribution, settlement and urbanization, agriculture, and
industry. Regional geography monographs in area studies typically
covered the region at the scale of the nation-state, the world region
(e.g., East Asia), or the continent (e.g., Asia). At its most complex, the
narrative of traditional regional geography wove diverse categories of
characteristics into comprehensive discussions of regional functions
and regional meaning. Some geographers maintained this approach,
1
once referred to as “the highest form of geographer’s art,” through the
1980s. In traditional regional geography, patterned categorical data
and regional explanations were typically organized and presented at
subnational scales in the context of natural regions or provinces.
The leading methodological statement on chorology was Richard
Hartshorne’s (1939) exposition of areal differentiation, “the study of
the areal variation of human and physical phenomena as they relate to
other spatially proximate and causally linked phenomena” (Johnston
et al., 2000: 34), which he advocated as the central integrative
approach for geographic scholarship. Within two decades, it was
widely criticized for emphasizing comparative and ideographic
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 83
analysis at the expense of emerging systematic theoretical approaches
that were related to positivist scientific methods. The attacks on areal
differentiation opened up opportunities for new paradigms, and
approaches in spatial analysis based on quantitative methods came to
the fore in the 1950s and 1960s. With this so-called quantitative revolution in geography, regional science and spatial modeling took priority. Regional science approaches included location theory and
regional systems theory, on which the macroregion model was based.
TRADITIONAL REGIONAL APPROACHES AND THE SOUTH CHINA COAST
Traditional regional geographies of China, by both Western and
Chinese scholars, have assessed its characteristics in the context of
natural regions or provinces. The standard account, delineated by the
geographer Ren Mei’e in association with Yang Renzhang and Bao
Haosheng, divides China into eight regions: northeast China, north
China, central China, south China, southwest China, inner Mongolia,
northwest China, and Qinghai-Tibet (Ren Mei’e, Yang Renzhang, and
Bao Haosheng, 1979, 1985). Physical regions can also be determined
by natural regions or biomes, which are characterized by relatively
uniform climate and vegetation patterns. A comprehensive classification of China’s biome divisions in the 1950s resulted in a three-tiered
scheme: 3 large-scale natural regions (eastern monsoon China, northwest arid China, and the Qinghai-Xizang plateau), 7 at the meso-scale,
and 33 smaller ones. According to this scheme, the south China coast
is contained within the subtropical humid region (see Zhao, 1986;
Hou Xueyu, 1988).
At both larger and smaller scales, physical regions can also be
defined by the topographical characteristics of drainage basins or
watersheds. In China, major rivers effectively act as latitudinal
divides, from the northern border with Russia at the Heilongjiang to
the Huanghe in north China, the Changjiang/Yangzi system in central
China, and the Zhujiang system in the far south (e.g., Zhongshan
Daxue Dili Xi, 1984-1988). The most widely used regional approach
to social scientific analysis in China area studies in the West in the second half of the twentieth century, the macroregion, is a watershed
model.
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84 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
Traditional regional geographies delimited a south coastal region
between the margins of the Yangzi and Zhujiang deltas and named it
the “southeast coast.” This southeast coast, with some minor variation in areal extent and interpretation, has been incorporated into all
twentieth-century English-language regional geographies of China,
from George Cressey (1934, 1955) to T. R. Tregear (1965, 1980), Theodore Shabad (1972), and the macroregion approach developed by
G. William Skinner (1977a, 1977c, 1977d, 1985). The watershed
region of the southeast coast centers on Fujian province, containing
most of Zhejiang south of the Yangzi delta and the northeast corner of
Guangdong province. It lies between the larger watersheds of the
Yangzi and Zhujiang rivers, bounded by the Wuyi Shan to the west.
The topography of the region is dominated by a series of mountain
ranges trending from the northeast to southwest, which descend in elevation from the 2,000 meter heights of the Wuyi Shan down to the narrow coastal plain. The mountains are shot through with systems of
several small rivers—the Oujiang, Minjiang, Jinjiang, Jiulongjiang,
and Hanjiang—which empty into deltas that form the primary settlement areas in the region.
Cressey (1955) treated the southeast coast in the narrative style of
the more complex type of traditional regional geography, offering
wide-ranging observations on the area’s physical environment, economic activities, and social organization. But his observations revealed that economic activities and social organization crossed regional boundaries, tying the coastal region beyond the watershed to
other settlements of distant shores:
Few regions in China have a smaller arable percentage. . . . The region
is normally a deficit area in food. Rice, wheat, and sugar come in by
boat from abroad. Cash remittances from overseas colonists contribute
to the income of many families, in normal years to the extent of millions of dollars. . . .
The Southeastern Coast is more sea-conscious than any other part of
China. . . . The shores of Chekiang, Fukien, and Kwangtung have innumerable harbors. Several hundred thousand people make all or part of
their livelihood from the sea.
Every fishing area along the Southeastern Coast has its distinctive
style of junk. Captains of steamships plying the foggy route between
Shanghai and Hong Kong can tell whether they are off Amoy or
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 85
opposite Swatow by noting the character of the local craft. [Cressey,
1955: 207]
The human-environmental conditions of the China coast that Cressey
recorded, based on patterns of activity he observed in the field, transcended the physical boundaries of the southeastern coast region he
helped define. His descriptions of economic activity on the south
China coast were reasonably accurate; yet bound by conventional
practice, he too did not recognize that knowledge about the region
could be organized in ways other than that provided by the container
of the physical region. Work such as Cressey’s exemplifies the ambiguities and disjunctures that result in the practice of regional geography when one attempts to account for both physical and human
characteristics.
The southeast coast region is in part characterized by one category
of human phenomena, agricultural activity, because agriculture is
based in physical environmental conditions. Patterns of social and
economic organization, religion, language, and ethnicity—other
common bases for delineating cultural regions—reliably extend
beyond its boundaries or are diverse within it. Formal associations of
sojourning fellow provincials, trade and merchant associations, and
triad organizations have existed along most of the southeast
coast—and in Chinese overseas communities, especially in Southeast
Asia. Some patterns of social organization have been dominant across
Fujian and Guangdong into the Zhujiang delta, but not in Zhejiang
(Freedman, 1958, 1966; but see Faure, 1986). Daoist ritual and popular cults in southern Fujian have prevailed on both sides of the Taiwan
Strait but not throughout the larger region of the southeast coast
(Dean, 1993, 1998). Language divides rather than unifies the physical
region of the southeast coast: the dialect patterns in south China are
the most complex in the country and, in effect, create their own subregions (Norman, 1988). Spatial patterns of ethnic diversity have followed not so much the areal extent of physical regions as altitude
zones: Han peoples have historically dominated the low-lying coastal
strips and river valleys, while non-Han ethnic groups have occupied
the uplands of the mountainous interior (Eberhard, 1968). In all these
ways, human patterns of activity, even historic patterns of economic
practices, have not “fit” the physical region of the southeast coast.
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86 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
The attempt to capture human processes within the physical region
raised conceptual problems about environmental determinism, or the
problematic doctrine that environmental conditions determine human
activities (see Livingstone, 1992). Reliance on the framework of the
physical region led some early twentieth-century analysts, including
Cressey, to mistakenly conclude that environmental factors produce
patterns of human activity, even though such determinism is clearly
impossible (cultures differ among the same and similar natural envi2
ronments). With no credible empirical evidence to support its preconceptions, environmental determinism was abandoned. Moreover,
scholars seeking to move beyond description to assess causality found
little room for analysis in traditional regional geography. These fundamental problems with viewing human activity through the lens of
physical regions led to substantial debate within the discipline.
A NEW REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY?
Critics of traditional regional geography have pointed to its
descriptive nature, its treatment of regions as “natural” and “out there”
rather than socially produced, and its lack of concern with causal processes (Pudup, 1988). In response, in the 1980s, geographers called for
a “new” regional geography that would consider a range of dynamic
factors in theorizing about the evolution of regions: it would examine
historic processes that produced patterns of human activity rather than
describing patterned phenomena; it would analyze how local, regional, national, and global processes are mutually influential, rather
than focusing on a single scale, such as the province or nation, as a
static condition; and it would focus on differences in human agency
among and within culture groups rather than explaining humanenvironment relations through generalized characteristics of principal
culture groups. Two studies published during this period—by Derek
Gregory (1982) on the woolen industry in Yorkshire and by Allan Pred
(1986) on land reform in southern Sweden—seemed to present clear
alternatives to traditional regional geography. Both focused on
subnational regions, identified the causes of regional social formation,
and used structuration theory (discussed below) to formulate a new way
of theorizing the region. While their concern with economic processes
was typical of works in the second strand of regional geography, these
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 87
studies were emblematic of the new directions being taken in human
geography more broadly; Pred, in particular, laid the groundwork for
theorizing the geographical concept of place.
Regional geography based in economic geography traditionally
used approaches derived from neoclassical economics to theorize
location and distribution in regional economies. Regional science,
which relied on quantitative analysis, differed sharply from the more
humanistic, qualitative form of traditional regional geography. Its
claims to scientific rigor, based on statistical modeling and neoclassical theory, enhanced its popularity with some geographers, planners,
and economists. But after the “quantitative revolution” in geography
in the 1960s, many geographers began to stray from regional science
(Gregory, 1978; Billinge, Gregory, and Martin, 1984). While its conclusions were scientifically or methodologically defensible, they were
often at odds with empirical reality in the economic landscape:
regional science proved unable to explain uneven economic development (Smith, 1984). In response, many economic geographers also
turned to social theory to theorize processes behind the realities of
spatial patterns.
The new theories of regional economies adopted historical and evolutionary approaches. Some geographers used world systems theory
(Wallerstein, 1974) to structure analyses of interactions between the
world economy and the economies of nation-states or world regions
(e.g., Agnew, 1987; Dixon, 1991). Of course, this turn was not unique
to geography: world systems theory has had a sustained impact on
social scientific analysis in general by drawing attention to the economic activity between national and global scales. However, because
of its own weaknesses as a paradigm—its inability to incorporate local
issues and human agency—it has fallen out of use as a distinct meth3
odological approach in regional analysis.
The most notable alternative to theorizing regional economies appeared in Doreen Massey’s (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labor, which
employed the concepts of “layers of investment” and “spatial divisions of labor” to explain uneven development and changing labor regimes in different regions of the United Kingdom. Massey’s comprehensive approach both theorized the regional political economy and
recognized the historical specificity of a set of distinct places that give
rise to the region; it thus answered the charge that Marxist approaches
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88 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
had rendered places “placeless” by focusing on the forces of production or had wholly subsumed real people and places in theoretical discussions of class relations and capitalist accumulation. More recently,
Michael Storper (1997), in The Regional World, has summarized
much of the new interdisciplinary theoretical work on subnational
economic regions in Europe, Japan, and the United States, as the idea
of region was “rediscovered”:
Surprisingly, a fairly large number of social scientists, and not just
those whose professional specialty is the region, began to respond in
the early 1980s that regionalization was very important, and that it
might be more than merely another localization pattern: it might actually be central to the coordination of the most advanced forms of economic life today. The stakes of these debates are big in both theoretical
and practical terms. [Storper, 1997: 4]
Recent work on regionalization aims at understanding the concentration of global economic activity in metropolitan industrial regions.
The popular appeal of Kenichi Ohmae’s (1990, 1993, 1995) ideas
about the “region-state” and the critical scholarly attention paid to his
formulation (e.g., Yeung, 1998) illustrate the contemporary resurgence of ideas about the importance of regional formations.
SOCIAL THEORY AND THE “SPATIAL TURN”
In several ways, the debate over traditional and new approaches in
regional geography was really about the larger paradigm shift in geography from empirical and descriptive work to approaches based in
social theory. Agitation over disciplinary changes mirrored concerns
about the degree to which geographers were becoming interested in
employing critical theory. This more fundamental disagreement hid
behind an opposition between “the local,” or place-based empirical
studies, and “the global,” or causal analyses undertaken from a structural Marxist perspective (e.g., Holmen, 1995; Entrikin, 1997). Also
at play here was the unspoken divide—an unnecessary split, all too
common in the academy generally—between scholars in foreign area
specialties, including geographers of China, and leading theorists
working on the industrialized world.
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 89
Conversely, the debates in regional geography over critical social
theory could be viewed less ideologically, as part of a wider intellectual shift in the academy. The adoption of social theory in geography
parallels the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, as
exemplified especially in the work of the European social theorists
4
Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Henri Lefebvre. Their writings and critiques of them have helped shift the organization of knowledge from being by default historical to cognizant of history but
self-consciously spatial. The complex projects of these three theorists
have powerfully influenced social thought, and a few key strains of
social-spatial relations in their work are worth setting forth here.
Both Foucault (e.g., 1965, 1973, 1977, 1980) and Giddens (e.g.,
1979, 1981, 1984, 1985) were especially concerned with conceptualizing power relations in situated contexts, and their ideas opened up
new perspectives on the institutional structures and spatial settings
through and in which analysis can be framed. Lefebvre’s (1991) ideas
about the production of space, encapsulated in his “conceptual triad”
(spatial practice, representations of space, and representational
spaces), focus more specifically on the materialities of space, particularly relationships between the state and private capital interests and
how this alliance creates the urban built environment. These ideas,
especially their stress on the agents engaging in spatial practices, complement structuration theory, as formulated by Giddens (1984). The
focus on human agency also highlighted the limits of structural Marxism and arguably set the stage for the poststructural shift in social
theory.
The new regional geography in the 1980s drew with particular frequency on Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory, which sought to explain how both social and institutional structures in society, when
combined with individual human agency, account for the processes by
which societies and institutions are organized and transformed. In this
theory, Giddens introduced the concept of locales, which he identified
as “the use of space to provide the settings of interaction” (Giddens,
1984: 118), and emphasized the importance of the region and of
regionalization at diverse scales. Structuration theory recognizes the
ways in which forms of social organization and social activity are
contextualized in institutions and power structures. For Giddens,
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90 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
regionalization is not a process of mapping and delimiting an area but
a method of understanding how social processes can simultaneously
have spatial and chronological dimensions:
“Region” may sometimes be used in geography to refer to a physically
demarcated area on a map of the physical features of the material environment. This is not what I mean by the term, which as used here
always carries the connotation of the structuration of social conduct
across time-space. Thus there is a strong degree of regional differentiation, in terms of class relationships and a variety of other social criteria,
between the North and the South in Britain. “The North” is not just a
geographically delimited area but one with long-established, distinctive social traits. By the “character” of regionalization I refer to the
modes in which the time-space organization of locales is ordered
within more embracing social systems.5 [Giddens, 1984: 122]
In this approach, the systems are social and the regions are actively
constituted, produced by diverse human activities. Both Gregory and
Pred introduced structuration theory to regional analysis in geography, and the idea of structure and agency has become so widely understood and thoroughly assimilated into subsequent theoretical formulations that Giddens no longer need be cited. Viewing the region as
a social construct has become important in geographical explanations
generally, and the concept is applied at different scales of analysis—
municipal, subnational, transboundary, or transnational. The next section examines similar shifts in the field of economic geography, which
forms the basis for examining the development of the macroregion
model.
TRADITIONAL ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND LOCATION THEORY
Traditional economic geography was based on location theory.
Location models of the industrial era, conventionally used to explain
economic activities from the Industrial Revolution to about 1970, are
spatialized representations of the neoclassical economic paradigm;
they apply to local and regional scales typically within the nation6
state. There are three main location models: the model of agricultural
land rent, for the agricultural landscape, devised by Johann Heinrich
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 91
von Thünen (1826, 1966); central place theory, for the landscapes of
retail trade, developed by Walter Christaller (1933, 1966) and August
Lösch (1940, 1954); and the space economy of industrial production,
a model of industrial location set forth by Alfred Weber (1909, 1929).
For their explanatory power, all relied on a set of assumptions about
transportation constraints, the location of natural resources or goods
and services, and idealized human behavior.
Like structural theory in general, location theory worked by relying
on generalizations that ignored distinctive human and physical geographies. Each model sought to explain a generalized economic landscape in which all behavior is “rational,” thereby treating the behavior
7
or culture of economic decision makers as fixed and undifferentiated.
Moreover, each assumed uniform landscapes, ignoring variations in
topography and resource distribution. In this way, the theories were
useful for defining and predicting idealized spatial patterns, but they
provided no causal explanations for many patterns that actually
existed. All three of the models found empirical validation in the landscapes of the European West, more specifically in eastern and southern Germany. Geography as a university subject had its origins in Germany, and the German tradition of geography, especially in political
and economic fields, has been strong (see James and Martin, 1972;
8
Livingstone, 1992).
Von Thünen focused on explaining the spatial distribution of agricultural land use. His model sought to define the price of land rent in
relation to a single variable: distance from the farm to the market town.
It predicted a pattern of land use characterized by a core market center,
surrounded by concentric peripheral zones of decreasing production
intensity. Von Thünen himself, as Peter Lloyd and Peter Dicken
(1972: 34) observe, “was a German estate owner who, in the early
nineteenth century, began to investigate with great scientific precision
the best way of organizing agricultural land use.” Central place theory,
as developed by Walter Christaller, is similar to but more complex
than this model of agricultural land rent.
Central place theory is a “ ‘general deductive theory’ designed ‘to
explain the size, number and distribution of towns’ in the belief that
‘some ordering principles govern the distribution’ ” (Berry and Pred,
1961: 3). The actual central places on which Christaller built his
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92 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
theoretical model were the towns forming the pattern of settlement in
Bavaria, a densely settled agricultural landscape in southern Germany. He was certainly influenced by the characteristics of the region
as well as by the intellectual ethos dominating German industrial society between the wars. (Perhaps the most critical cultural marker of the
era was Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film that portrayed a futuristic
oppressive industrial society in which, to maximize production and
accumulation, machines ran the lives of workers.) Much as the
machine-based culture of the industrial era is shaped by its emphasis
on productivity (which changed social time), so central place theory
depends fundamentally on a set of cost minimization principles.
A central place is a location that provides goods and services for a
surrounding area. Taken together, central places are grouped in a hierarchy: places at the same level are assumed to produce the same goods,
while higher order centers provide everything that lower order centers
do and more. A settlement area of central places theoretically exhibits
an evenly distributed population across a relatively featureless plain,
self-sufficiency in economic services, and purchasing power distributed uniformly among the population. Consumers are expected to act
rationally in the marketplace to minimize distance. Central place theory also assumed that products are uniform—that is, businesses sell
exactly the same products at the same price in all towns—and that the
system functions within a political territory.9 The actual hierarchy
exhibited in such a system varied, as a specific population ranked
goods and services in order of their different “demand thresholds” and
“ranges.” The demand threshold value is the minimum level of demand
for a good needed to keep a producer in business, and the range is the
distance consumers are willing to travel to purchase a product or service.
August Lösch (1940, 1954), working a half decade after Christaller,
modified central place theory, introducing a less rigid and more complex system in which settlements of the same size could produce and
10
retail different goods and services. Lösch’s analysis discerned up to
150 different spatial arrangements of market area structures, whereas
Christaller’s interpretation focused on just 3 (see Lloyd and Dicken,
1972: 47). Both Christaller and Lösch are generally credited with
founding central place theory, the locational model on which the
macroregional model is based. Industrial location theory, developed
by Alfred Weber (the younger brother of Max Weber), is a minimum-
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 93
cost model that sought to predict the specific locations of manufacturing and heavy industries such as iron and steel by focusing on the constraints of transportation by rail. As Gregory (1981: 181) notes,
Weber’s work also “was deeply imbricated in the ideological and
material imperatives of German society.”
CHINESE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE “MACROREGION”
The macroregion model emerged in the late 1970s as the major spatial and regional approach in China area studies. In several ways, it
reflected the paradigm shifts of its era. By the 1980s, the call for a
“China-centered” history had taken hold in reaction to previous paradigms, especially those that concentrated on Chinese society in relation to the West—the “impact-response” approach to Chinese history
(Esherick, 1972). China scholars looking for new approaches found
alternatives in local social and economic history, as the macroregion
became the dominant new paradigm. The macroregion literally
mapped the new trends toward a China-centered scholarship by providing a model for regional historiography, thereby lending structure
to the notion of epistemologies that originated within the context of
Chinese society itself.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE MACROREGION
From the 1970s through the present, most research published on
late imperial China employing a spatialized and place-based approach
has been indebted, directly or indirectly, to the work of G. William
Skinner and the regional model he developed, the macroregion. The
majority of China area studies scholars engaging in local history have
referred to the macroregion, whether they invoke the model’s larger
conceptual complex of location theory and regional systems theory or,
increasingly, simply use it as a locational device (see, e.g., Schoppa,
1982; Rowe, 1984: 8-9; Naquin and Rawski, 1987; Dean, 1993: 21-23;
Esherick and Rankin, 1990: 17-19; Spence, 1990: 91-93; Leong,
1997: 19; So, 2000). According to Judith Farquhar and James Hevia
(1993: 496), Skinner’s “regional-marketing systems approach . . . has
been a ruling organizational paradigm for social history in China.” Yet
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94 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
such widespread acceptance has its dangers; Martin Heijdra (1995:
31) has observed that the models have been “adopted as a whole by
historians with only the most minimal revisions, to such a point that
direct spatial investigations of phenomena are excluded from most
11
current research.” In geography, by contrast, diverse analytical
approaches in spatial and regional analysis have emerged since the era
of central place theory and regional systems theory. That these
approaches have not appeared in China area studies, where the
macroregion has prevailed as the orthodox methodology, appears to
signal a divide between area studies and the discipline.
Skinner’s methodological work has two notable themes: the
macroregion and the importance of marketing towns. In his argument
about marketing towns, he demonstrated that they were important set12
tlements with periodic markets in productive agricultural areas,
which reflected increasing local diversification of the agricultural
economy. Skinner thereby explained how local-level settlements that
arose from the agricultural economy were integrated into the larger
Chinese urban system; more important, he demonstrated that their
existence was fundamentally economic, the result of local retail economies, and not administrative, the result of an imperial order. This distinction spurred an important move away from viewing history as
imperial, dominated by the perspective of the capital, to concentrating
on local and regional social and economic issues. Skinner’s understanding of an integrated system of economic settlements also helped
break down the rigid stereotypes that divided social life in China into
rural and urban realms and undercut notions that the rise of such a system must be tied to the development of industrial capitalism.13
Skinner drew his original data for the marketing systems model
from settlement patterns in Sichuan province, where he conducted
fieldwork in 1949-1950, and focused on the locations and frequency
14
of periodic markets. The Sichuan basin, one of China’s most fertile
regions, supports a high population density and correspondingly
dense and well-distributed settlement patterns. On the basis of his
observations in Sichuan, and despite considerable regional diversity
in eastern China, Skinner extended the idea of a system of central
places to all of Han China (Skinner, 1964, 1965a, 1965b). The marketing systems model, nominally based on the work of both Christaller
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 95
and Lösch (Skinner, 1964: 5), in fact relied solely on Christaller’s version of central place theory. The model was organized into a hierarchy
of three types of marketing towns—standard, intermediate, and central; central markets were often the county (xian) capitals of the Chinese administrative system (Skinner, 1964: 9). More than simply
determining settlement patterns, “market structures . . . inevitably
shape local social organization and provide one of the crucial modes
for integrating myriad peasant communities into the single social system which is the total society” (Skinner, 1964: 3). This characterization suggests that market towns should also be understood as centers
of societal interaction where people negotiated a range of activities,
including contracting for labor services, locating marriage partners,
and establishing local control and patronage networks. The marketing
systems approach thus provides an important basis for analyzing local
history. Indeed, Skinner argues that it is the only basis for located
scholarship on modern and premodern China: “an adequate interpretation of developments since 1949 in the Chinese countryside must
rest on a prior analysis of premodern peasant marketing” (Skinner,
1964: 3). These claims and others, however, have been periodically
challenged by empirical research (e.g., Huang, 1985; Potter and Pot15
ter, 1990; Hodder, 1993; Siu, forthcoming).
As presented by Skinner, the marketing systems model did not
include data on the demand threshold and range of goods and services,
an absence that has particularly concerned geographers. Empirical
studies of marketing patterns, as a rule, have laid out the spatial characteristics of marketing landscapes by analyzing particular kinds of
data, including where consumers lived, where they marketed, the
products and services they sought, their distance to market, the number of journeys they made, and so forth. Such analyses usually enable
researchers to distinguish standard, intermediate, and central market
towns. In contrast, the geographers Richard Szymanski and John
Agnew (1981: 39) criticize Skinner’s application of central place theory to Sichuan province as “diagrammatic and without mathematical
basis.”
In their detailed analysis, Szymanski and Agnew (1981) raise many
concerns, questioning in particular the simple transformation of a presumed geography of market towns in Sichuan into maps of hexagonal
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96 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
networks. The Sichuan study reproduces the theoretical spatiality predicted by central place theory, but, as they point out, patterns of marketing town distribution differ substantially in shape and arrangement
(Szymanski and Agnew, 1981: 44-45). Whereas Skinner (1964: 17)
reported that “in six areas of China where [he was] able to test the
proposition, a majority of market towns have precisely six immediately neighboring market towns and hence a marketing area of hexagonal shape,” they observe that “it does not necessarily follow that
because a market town has six immediately neighboring markets that
its marketing area is hexagonal. The latter is a separate determination”
(Szymanski and Agnew, 1981: 42). They also object that Skinner provided no figures to demonstrate “his method for discriminating among
standard, intermediate, and central market towns” (Szymanski and
Agnew, 1981: 4).
Similarly, Rupert Hodder (1993: 39-42) has judged China’s rural
economy, with its different types of locally and regionally specific
markets and fairs, to be substantially more complex than the hierarchy
posited by central place theory, suggesting that a Löschian emphasis
in research methodology might be more appropriate. He also questions the assumed correlation between settlements and markets, arguing that “there is no clear relationship between the ‘type’of market and
16
the ‘type’of settlement identified by Skinner” (Hodder, 1993: 39). In
sum, in the absence of a verifiable data set for Sichuan, or indeed for
anywhere else in China, one cannot conclude with certainty that hexagonal market areas were the characteristic spatial pattern of the coun17
try’s social and economic landscape.
The macroregion model combined the idea of a system of marketing towns with concepts from von Thünen’s core-periphery model and
ideas about regional systems (Agnew, 1990: 1). In this second stage of
conceptualizing settlements, the marketing systems model was
reworked on a larger scale to cover regional systems, to which the
neologism “macroregions” was applied. Recognizing regional variations in economy and urbanization rates in China, Skinner (1977a,
1977d) posited the existence of nine distinct regional systems, or
macroregions, whose areas corresponded to the physical regions of
drainage basins or watersheds. The macroregion approach replaced
the theoretical uniformity prescribed by central place theory,
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 97
modifying the idealized model with a set of core-periphery characteristics (Skinner, 1977a: 283-88). The new model left unchanged
assumptions about transport constraints and systematic variation in
transport costs; thus, high costs of transportation in the periphery
would minimize both the transactions between macroregions and the
transboundary connections across macroregion hinterlands.
This element of the model has periodically been challenged, especially by Hodder (1993: 40, 50), who points out that regional scholars—most notably Yoshinobu Shiba (1970)—have long noted the
existence of “mountain markets” at topographical (macroregional)
boundaries throughout the Jiangnan area. Concerns have also been
raised over the model’s suitability for addressing such transregional
economic questions as long-distance trade and the evolution of
national markets, especially in select commodities (e.g., Sands and
Myers, 1986; Hodder, 1993). Nevertheless, Skinner has defended the
macroregion, like his system of market towns, as the only appropriate
approach for all located research in Han China: “physiographic
macroregions are the proper units for analyzing urbanization. To consider units that cover only part of a macroregion is to wrench out of
context a more or less arbitrary portion of a systemic whole” (Skinner,
18
1977d: 217). But unlike applications of the marketing systems
approach, the macroregion was given historical limits. The data set for
the model was derived from counting and mapping major towns and
cities in China; the collection point was set in the early 1890s, because
the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki was assumed to be a “turning point in
19
China’s urban development” (Skinner, 1977d: 236). The Treaty of
Shimonoseki allowed the construction of foreign-owned factories and
transportation infrastructure, which presumably resulted in a historical divide between the preindustrial and industrial eras. New transportation technologies could alter the demand threshold and range of
products and services, breaking down the constraints embedded in the
central place model. China also experienced greater fiscal problems
after 1895; as loans from and indemnities owed to foreign powers
increased, the resulting pressures affected urban and economic development. Such international forces could not be accounted for by models derived from location theory.
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98 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
THE MACROREGION AND THE SOUTHEAST COAST
The macroregion model was never systematically applied to the
nine macroregions of Han China, but the southeast coast macroregion
(which corresponded to Cressey’s southeast coast region) received a
focused assessment (Skinner, 1985). In this analysis, the model was
also historicized through the concept of cycles of regional development, a related systems model. Skinner applied the traditional terms
of Chinese historiography—the Chinese dynastic cycles. He found
the level of economic activity on the southeast coast to be high during
the Yuan dynasty of Mongol rule, when the port of Quanzhou functioned as the center of lucrative long-distance trade. After this period
of high-level economic activity, imperial trade proscriptions during
the early Ming period drove the coastal economy into a precipitous
decline. The landing of the Portuguese and Spanish on the China coast
in the sixteenth century led to an economic resurgence in the region
from about 1520 to 1640, explained Skinner, but with another round of
trade prohibitions from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century, the regional economy declined once again. He concluded that
“this dark age for the Southeast Coast was ended only in the 1840s,
when Fuzhou and Xiamen were opened as treaty ports” (Skinner,
1977a: 279).
The macroregion model explained the growth and decline of trading activity on the southeast coast by focusing on the region’s port cities and imperial trade policy. This regional analysis of the vagaries of
trade on the coast over the longue durée depended on standard
accounts of the region written from the perspective of the capital. By
contrast, local histories make clear that trade restrictions were
unevenly enforced and that mariners successfully circumvented trade
bans. In Trade and Society: The Amoy Network, a study of the maritime economy of the south China coast from 1683 to 1735 based on an
analysis of local and official histories, Chin-keong Ng (1983) demonstrates that imperial trade bans did not end the lucrative coastal trade;
“moreover, the more restrictive the law was, the more lucrative the
trade became” (Ng, 1983: 53). Dian Murray (1987: 10), in her work on
coastal piracy, observes that “the junk trade was at its height during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Chinese merchants monopolized the exchange of ‘Straits produce’ from Southeast
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 99
Asia—rattan, seaweed, and pepper—and thwarted European attempts
to supply these goods to China.” Sarasin Viraphol (1977: 7), writing
about the long-distance trade with Siam, concludes that the junk trade
was at its height at the end of the eighteenth century and during the
early decades of the nineteenth century.
Ng (1983: 59) points out that the 1757 decree restricting all foreign
merchants to Canton, thereby creating the infamous “Canton system,”
served its purpose—to prohibit the English from trading at Ningbo,
where they had found it possible to avoid some of the duties levied at
Canton, but it did not block the arrival of the Nanyang traders, from
Luzon, Sulu, Siam, and elsewhere, or affect the native junk trade.
Amoy remained the designated port for indigenous overseas trade,
while foreign ships were redirected to Guangzhou. After an exhaustive study of the tea trade on the southeast coast, Robert Gardella
(1994: 33) concludes that “Skinner greatly overstates the case of an
alleged economic depression along the littoral in the early to
mid-Qing era, and neglects the impact of interregional and international trade upon the interior or peripheral zones of Southeast China
over the same span of time.” Indeed, the macroregion analysis did not
distinguish between the activities of Western mercantilists and the
regionally important junk trade with Southeast Asia, Taiwan, the
20
Liuqius, and Japan. By limiting “trade” to trade with Western mercantile powers, the macroregion analysis of the southeast coast also
emphasized the significance of the treaty ports and the dualisms of tradition and modernity that characterize the “impact-response”
approach to Chinese historiography.
THE LIMITS OF LOCATION THEORY AND REGIONAL SYSTEMS THEORY
The southeast coast is an interesting choice for testing marketing
systems and macroregional approaches because these models, by their
definition, do not theorize extrasystemic processes—in this case,
21
long-distance trade. Long-distance trade differs substantially in
scale and scope from the commercial activity characteristic of a system of central places or a regional system; it relies on different social
and economic organizational strategies (particularly wholesaling and
economies of scale) and different types of production and distribution
22
networks. An early critic, James Vance (1970), focused on the inabil-
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100 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
ity of central place theory to account for wholesaling, an element of
economic organization in long-distance trade that presumes the existence of merchants who seek economies of scale, amalgamate their
goods through middlemen, and accumulate speculative capital in order to fund trading ventures.23 He argues that
central place theory fails to provide the system of analysis needed to
account for the general structure and location of wholesale trade. In
fact, the basic inability of Christaller’s theory to handle trade practiced
by agents probably accounts for the almost total absence of geographical literature dealing with wholesaling. [Vance, 1970: 6]
Although central place theory is a deductive model with landscape-specific origins, concerned with particular types of economic
activities, scholars have deployed it as a general methodology irrespective of the forms of economic organization and urbanization of
the place being studied. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, the marketing systems and macroregion models do not reflect the Chinese
landscape as much as they demonstrate the application of paradigms
in regional science and systems theory.
Regional systems theory is a variant of general systems theory,
which emerged during the 1950s as the major scientific paradigm for
the social sciences. Its scientific credentials were ensured by its origins in natural science; indeed, Robert Lilienfeld (1978: 20) criticizes
it as “the latest attempt to create a world myth based on the prestige of
24
science.” Regional systems theory, like regional science, has
employed neoclassical economics and statistical methods to examine
spatial issues in the economic landscape. But even Harry Richardson
(1973: 22-23), one of the theorists of regional analysis whom Skinner
cites, explained that although neoclassical models have dominated
regional growth theory, their background assumptions are “inapplicable” to regional economies, noting that the “abstractions that the neoclassicist uses as a starting point for his analysis could never be justified in a world which recognizes the existence of space as well as
time.” He then both asked and answered the obvious question: “why
have neoclassical models attracted so much attention from regional
economists? One reason must be the relative ease with which ideas in
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 101
aggregate growth theory can be borrowed and adapted for regional
economic analysis” (Richardson, 1973: 23-24).
The macroregion model also used the rank-size rule, one of the
tools of regional analysis, to account for settlement distribution patterns (see Skinner, 1977d: 236-49). But as geographers and regional
scientists have shown, this mathematical model, developed to account
for apparent regularities in city-size distribution, cannot predict those
conditions; indeed, the so-called rule may apply even to randomly
selected data. G. R. Carroll (1982) surveys the problems in an article
titled “National City-Size Distributions: What Do We Know after 67
25
Years of Research?” Not only do the location, size, and growth of settlements regularly vary intra- and interregionally, but the social processes that account for these differences vary considerably. Thus, as
the marketing systems and macroregion models work to delineate the
regularities of spatial patterns in the settlement landscape, they necessarily work against one of their putative goals—discovering the richness and variation of local history.
Early on, geographers saw the methodological advantages of combining location theory and regional systems analysis, and they produced the secondary materials on which the macroregion model is
based. Geographical scholars also quickly identified the limits of
these approaches. Probably the most sophisticated of the group was
Allan Pred, whose research on U.S. city systems and information circulation analyzed the information diffusion between cities as a measure of interconnectivity (Pred, 1966, 1973). By examining actual
processes—the long-distance circulation of information in newspapers, postal services, travel, port city activity, and innovation diffusion—Pred (1973) moved beyond the analysis of settlement distribution to assess the qualities of intersettlement relations embedded in the
hierarchical location models. This approach made it possible to compare intraregional and interregional effects. He concluded that information flows between settlements were much more complex than the
Christallerian hierarchy allowed and that nonhierarchical interurban
innovation diffusion was especially important (Pred, 1973: 186-238).
These conclusions affirm the importance of interurban relations
between the largest cities in each region and thus the significance of
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102 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
interregional processes. In presenting his concept of the macroregion,
Skinner (1977a: 718, n. 9) footnoted Pred’s work as “relevant and theoretically interesting,” but he made no use of its more complex
approach.
Other geographers pursued the problems of uneven development
ignored by the location models. Neil Smith (1989), drawing in part on
an early review by Massey (1978), summarized the critiques of location theory, which he categorized into four types. One of the leading
criticisms, of particular concern to historians, is that location theory
is inherently ahistorical. Rather than seeking the origins and evolution of human and cultural differences in the landscape, it reduces
human relations to abstract spatial terms of measured distance.
Because location theory conceptualizes only economic equilibrium in
the landscape, it encourages its users to find synchronic similarities in
patterns and structures. The concepts of disequilibrium, or uneven
development, and regions of economic recession or decline play no
role in location theory—and thus they are masked. The addition of
dynastic cycles to the macroregion model only partially addressed this
problem.
The macroregion approach inserted into the watershed region the
idea of cores and peripheries, as determined by population distribution and transportation constraints, thereby apparently acknowledging uneven development. But this too is an element of a larger body of
theory in which it marks one stage in a historical process of capitalist
26
regional development. Identifying and describing cores and peripheries are different intellectual goals than is analyzing the processes
that sustain, connect, and transform those cores and peripheries.
Massey (1984: 118) uses the idea of “layers of investment” to conceptualize the historical landscape that location theory stubbornly refuses
to engage: “if a local economy can be analyzed as the historical product of the combination of layers of activity, those layers also represent
in turn the succession of roles the local economy has played within
wider national and international spatial structures.” She thus suggests
a starting point for regional historiography, or historical geography.
As a result of these and other highly critical assessments, central place
theory was abandoned by most geographers by the late 1970s, and
interest in regional systems theory began to wane.
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 103
In contrast, the macroregion model appears to have endured in
China area studies because, in accordance with the Kuhnian logic of
the structure of scientific revolutions, it has not been supplanted by
other methodologies; as many area specialists have noted, it has not
been systematically put to the test. Roy Bhaskar’s (1979: 167) observations about paradigm construction in the social sciences help explain why such impasses often continue:
The very absence of decisive test situations, coupled with continuing
formal allegiance to a predictive criterion, serves at once to mystify
methodology, protect entrenched (or otherwise privileged) theory,
stunt alternatives and/or encourage (a belief in) the unresolvability of
theoretical conflicts—which, in practice, of course means their resolution in favour of the status quo.
The failure of area studies scholars to test the macroregion model can
perhaps be traced to its initial formulation, which did not include the
data sets and data analysis typical of research on location theory.
Nonetheless, alternative approaches in spatial and regional analysis
have managed to emerge in geography and related fields. Arif Dirlik
(1996: 276) suggests a more specific reason why they have not developed in area studies:
Alternative paradigms enable us to see the alternative structures that in
their contestation reveal the complexity of human activity and, therefore, of history. To bind history to a single paradigm is not merely to
subject it to professional and social power but also to exclude from
investigation that does not accord with current paradigms.
THE POWER OF THE MAP
An important continuing legacy of the macroregion model is its
structuring of geographical analysis: it demands an intraregional
mode of analysis dependent on mapped regions. Because the model
requires that regional analysis take place within mapped macroregions, it creates a system of fixed regional representations. Many
studies that rely on the macroregion model have reproduced Skinner’s
original macroregion maps, both acknowledging the source of the
scholarship and presenting macroregions as the only nonprovincial
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104 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
Map 1
SOURCES: Cressey (1934) and Skinner (1977b).
regional context in which historic settlement and economic activity
in Han China can be analyzed. Indeed, such studies have often
debated whether particular patterns or activities fall within the
mapped regional boundaries, not recognizing the boundaries as them27
selves constructs that might be interpreted and remade. To begin to
rethink these possibilities, compare Maps 1 and 2, which present com-
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 105
Map 2
SOURCES: Skinner (1977b) and The Conservation Atlas of China (1990).
parative views of watershed regions. These maps overlay the
macroregions with Cressey’s physiographic regions and with natural
watershed regions, as defined by contemporary Chinese scientific cartography. All three of these schemes present watershed boundaries in
eastern China, and so their differences suggest alternative possibilities
for the map and problematize the notion that one of these maps must
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106 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
be true or correct for a given activity or process. I do not mean to suggest that all regional mappings are equally useful, but I wish to scrutinize the empirical validity and appropriateness of map production—
especially the drawing of maps of regions without political boundaries, constructed without substantial data points, especially in the
drawing of boundaries on the regional peripheries.28
Unlike books, which frequently revisit a particular subject to present fuller understandings of it, maps are not regularly redrawn to better
display more precise understandings of the mappable world. We read
texts critically, but we often neglect to view maps as texts, as selective
representations and social constructions of reality. Once the map is
viewed as a representational device, it emerges as an artifact with its
own context of production. Denis Wood’s (1992) critical analysis of
the power of maps problematizes the practices of map making and the
workings of maps. He begins by observing that “the map’s effectiveness is a consequence of . . . selectivity,” which is what “makes the map
a representation.” Maps also serve interests, which “select what from
the vast storehouse of knowledge about the earth the map will represent” (Wood, 1992: 1). His point is not to disregard the importance of
bounded regions such as provinces and other political territories,
which have significant real effects, but to recognize theoretically that
the act of drawing a boundary can be highly arbitrary. Confronting
these methodological problems led Massey (1991: 27) to confess, “I
remember some of my most painful times as a geographer have been
spent unwillingly struggling to think how one could draw a boundary
around somewhere like the ‘east midlands.’ ” Traditional methods in
regional geography were also concerned with mapping regions but
treated regional boundaries as containers of regional characteristics.
Massey instead recognizes that to understand regional processes, one
must often think beyond regional boundaries. As Agnew (1990: 4)
puts it, “Regions are made and remade in relation to one another and
not confined regionally.”
The macroregion model, with its basis in central place and regional
systems theories, has portrayed human settlement and structured spatial relations in the landscape with scientific regularity. Because the
macroregion maps are representations of that model, they have coded
its methodology. The maps have also suggested a particular research
design perspective. But has this perspective, restricted to the context
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 107
of defined macroregions, limited or even blocked the pursuit of other
topics, including transregional processes, comparative regional processes, relations between Han and non-Han areas, and transnational
processes? Chinese society exemplifies particularly interesting historical spatial and geographical characteristics—for example, in
urbanism and urban morphology, regionalism, regional merchant
associations, and human relations to native place—but to research
these subjects, one must investigate factors of human agency. Such
subjects have rarely been viewed in China area studies as appropriate
theoretical projects, although contemporary theoretical methods in
geography are well suited to their analysis. As a repeatedly mapped
spatial model, the macroregions over time have imbued China area
studies with a certain spatial determinism in organizing research
regionally and geographically, making spatial analysis of certain subjects and not others a high priority.
THE PRODUCTION OF A PARADIGM
With some exceptions, reviews of the use of location theory and
regional systems theory in the area studies literature have promoted
the marketing systems and macroregion models. In a theoretically
engaged introduction to his major two-volume study of Hankou, William Rowe (1984: 8) wrote that “the study of Chinese cities . . . took a
quantum leap forward with the initial application of ‘central-place’
theory to China, in G. William Skinner’s celebrated studies of rural
marketing.” In the same year Paul Cohen (1984: 165), in a survey of
Chinese historiography in which he expressed his strong desire for a
“China-centered Chinese history” to replace approaches originating
in the West, declared that “the impact of Skinner’s analysis on American students of Chinese history has already—and deservedly—been
far-reaching,” his favorable opinion apparently unaffected by the
macroregion’s Western roots. Charles Tilly (1989: 181), in considering early modern Europe, finds Skinner’s regional marketing systems
instructive for “thinking through broad economic changes and their
connections with political transformations without simply shoving
the economic changes into boxes defined by the boundaries of
national states.” Mingming Wang’s (1995: 35) study of Ming dynasty
Quanzhou credits “Skinner’s brilliant observation” with making the
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108 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
29
significance of space in Chinese society widely known. In examining Hakka migration, Sow Theng Leong (1997: 19) relies on “the
regional systems methodology of G. William Skinner, which has been
a breakthrough in the study of Chinese society as well as an approach
30
of broad social scientific application.” Reviewing the Western scholarship of Chinese urban history, Christian Henriot (1996: 157) notes
that the issues Skinner raised in his 1977 volume on late imperial
China “are still at the core of current research.” In a field with few theoretical models, Skinner made an important contribution and provided a framework for questions about aspects of spatial patterns in
the historical Chinese landscape.
Some dissenters in China studies have also questioned the utility of
the macroregion approach. Timothy Brook (1985) has pointed to the
limits of central place theory in analyzing settlements, and uniquely,
his criticisms are a consequence of consulting the geographical scholarship. After examining R. J. Johnston’s (1973) work on political and
economic geography, he concludes that interrelated political and economic systems affect the evolution of a system of settlements through
social, economic, and political institutions in which human agency
plays a crucial role (Brook, 1985: 43-45). In their study of local history in the Zhujiang delta, Helen Siu and David Faure (1995: 217-18)
caution that the regional systems approach falsely implies cultural
unity, and they note as well that “the way in which meaning links
human agency with geography goes beyond the economic logic of
transportation costs and marketing needs.” Criticizing the formulations of the marketing systems and macroregion approaches as lacking supporting data, Martin Heijdra (1995: 310) concludes that the
models remained untested in part because “in most cases, the evidence
that would validate these theories is simply not present over most of
31
China’s area or during most of its history.” He suggests instead basing regions on linguistic areas, an approach that would explicitly
incorporate cultural factors of settlement distribution. F. W. Mote
(1995: 75) ultimately takes the concern with supporting data even further, declaring that “after considering the Skinner paradigm sympathetically for almost twenty years I have concluded that its claims frequently defy historical evidence.” Among area studies scholars
writing on method and theory, apparently only Dirlik (1996: 266), in a
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 109
brief parenthetical note, has identified the problematic origins of the
Skinner scholarship in Western economic theory.
A particular history and set of discursive strategies transformed the
marketing systems and macroregion models from interesting and useful contributions to methodology into dominant paradigms. In the late
1960s, area studies conferences financed by the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, administered by the Social Science Research Council
(SSRC), and overseen by the SSRC’s Joint Committee on Contemporary China and the American Council of Learned Societies resulted in
three edited volumes that became standard sources for China specialists concerned with cities, regions, and economic processes. The third
in this series was The City in Late Imperial China (Skinner, 1977b; see
also Wilmott, 1972; Elvin and Skinner, 1974), in which the
macroregion model was influentially articulated. Skinner gave the
model its final elaboration, using the example of the southeast coast,
in his presidential address at the 1984 annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies (Skinner, 1985). He had already been the primary editor of a three-volume bibliography on Chinese society, covering literature in Western languages and in Chinese and Japanese
(Skinner, 1973), which had helped lend greater stature to his research
program.
The scholarly production of the paradigm can be traced through
Skinner’s citations. In the first section of a Journal of Asian Studies
paper published in three parts, he acknowledged the methodological
lineage of his work in central place theory with a single sentence: “The
approach taken here follows the lead of Christaller and Lösch” (Skinner, 1964: 5). Geographers’ work on China—namely, Sen-dou
Chang’s (1961) scholarship and Brian Berry and Allan Pred’s (1961)
description of it—was soon dismissed (Skinner, 1964: 7-8). Occasional later mention of central place theory constituted the limit of
Skinner’s direct textual engagement with geographical scholarship.
The first illustration in the Journal of Asian Studies paper features central place theory’s classic interlocked hexagrams, labeled “a model of
the Chinese standard marketing area as a stable spatial system,
together with three possible models of intermediate marketing areas”
(Skinner, 1964: 19). The phrase “central place” appears nowhere on
the diagram or in the accompanying text in reference to the diagram.
Indeed, that language yields to the terms Chinese standard marketing
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110 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
area and market town. This diagram foreshadows how in area studies
generally, the “marketing model” silently replaced its originary presentation in Christaller’s central place theory. A debt to central place
theory was certainly acknowledged in later publications, but by tracing the lineage of Skinner’s project to “the classical literature of economic geography” (Rowe, 1985: 259), its promoters implied that
those works were being recovered from a field of study that no one was
currently pursuing.
Skinner further elaborated the settlement model in The City in Late
Imperial China. To create the macroregion model, the marketing systems model was re-presented as a system of regions equated with “the
maximal hinterlands of high level central places” in Han China (Skinner, 1977a: 281). The endnote for this first point (Skinner, 1977a: 718,
n. 8) references R. D. McKenzie’s (1933) Metropolitan Community, a
historical analysis of settlement in the United States, and Robert E.
Dickinson’s (1947) analysis of U.S. and western European settlement
32
in City Region and Regionalism. The regional systems model also
requires that China’s settlement pattern be viewed as functionally
integrated urban systems, an idea that Skinner credits to Harry W.
Richardson’s (1969) Regional Economics: Location Theory, Urban
Structure, and Regional Change, a widely used text. Though the same
note (Skinner, 1977a: 718, n. 9) mentions Allan Pred’s (1973) work on
city systems, Skinner stresses the more standard presentations of
regional systems theory. In adopting the rank-size rule, he cites in the
main text the original methodological work of G. K. Zipf (Skinner,
1977d: 236); in the endnotes (Skinner, 1977d: 714, n. 37-38) the
source given for interpreting city-size distributions in China is a
33
regional text, Chauncy Harris’s (1970) Cities of the Soviet Union.
Next, Skinner argued that “taking the river basin as the essential regional determinant is particularly appropriate,” pointing to a “particular tradition,” tied to Philippe Buache, “which . . . dates back to the
eighteenth century” (Skinner, 1977c: 253). In the accompanying note,
Buache (an important figure in the French geographical tradition established by Vidal de la Blanche) is presented through Roger
34
Minshull’s (1967) Regional Geography: Theory and Practice.
Minshull discusses watersheds in part to caution against environmentally deterministic approaches, warning that “the idea of a regional division by river basins is no more an answer to the problem than any
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 111
other single method” (Minshull, 1967: 20-22). In relying on the claim
that “we are now in a position to modify the idealized model of central-place systems . . . in accord with the structure of China’s major regional systems” (Skinner, 1977a: 283) to develop the macroregion
model from marketing systems material, Skinner uses the language
but not the practice of science. As Agnew observes (1990: 6),
An irony of regional-systems theory, and Skinner has noted this, is that
though its logic rests on the idea of functional regions, much of the
actual statistical analysis of population and social processes relies
upon a fourfold division of macroregions into inner core, outer core,
near periphery, and far periphery. . . . Nowhere have I seen this convention justified. The danger here is of reproducing a convention . . . and
seeing it as natural order.
Though its theoretical basis was fundamentally geographical, the
macroregional model was articulated outside the realm and practice of
its disciplinary origins, and its proponents took no notice of the limiting assumptions of the theoretical material it invoked.35 Partly as a result, the popularity enjoyed by the macroregion in area studies circles
has arguably been critically uninformed.36 Moreover, scholars who
continue to cite the macroregion concept often limit their use of the
model to the basic physical region of a watershed, which situates their
analysis. And while a regional setting may be the appropriate for located work, a watershed-based model is only one type of regional approach and is simply defined by the topography of the natural landscape. Today, more than two decades after the term macroregion first
appeared in print, many China area studies specialists would be
hard-pressed to identify the theoretical origins of the marketing systems and macroregion models.
William Lavely (1989: 100) points to the origins of the regional
systems framework in “economic geography, social ecology, and the
world systems paradigm,” but of course world systems theory, articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein in numerous publications, is not
invoked by Skinner; indeed, that is an entirely different strain of theory, tied to critical analysis of the evolving world economy and to
Marxist scholarship. James Hevia (1995: 8), in his analysis of Qing
guest ritual informed by contemporary theory, misidentifies Skinner’s
methodological analysis as “descriptive structural sociology,” which
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112 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
he praises for treating culture as “epiphenomenal and variable” and
thereby destabilizing the “the coherent notion of tradition” that characterized the previous “China’s response to the West” perspective.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, the theoretical bases of the macroregion and the impact-response approach are the same. Finally, because
the theoretical limitations and historical specificity of marketing systems and macroregion models make them unsuited to studying various contemporary social and economic processes, their use splits historical from contemporary issues in China area studies. Although the
marketing systems model was in part designed to bridge divides
between historical and contemporary research (Skinner, 1965b), such
broad studies have been few; location theory is simply not used to analyze contemporary economic processes.
THE ACADEMY IN CHINA
In several respects, the scholarly production of the marketing systems and macroregion models from the 1950s onward reflected
debates and intellectual priorities within the American academy—the
emphasis on scientific methods associated with mathematical models,
the search for appropriately China-centered approaches to Chinese
history, reactions to theories of modernization, and struggles with
cold war legacies. Certainly the debate over divisions between area
studies and geography has been peculiar to the American academy,
with its relative lack of emphasis on training in geographical methods.
When it was initially proposed, the macroregion approach was also
compared to other U.S. scholarship in China area studies (as discussed
below) and legitimated in that context. Still, the preceding outline of
the model’s development raises questions about its reception among
scholars in China, and I offer here some preliminary remarks about
their use of it. This discussion must remain preliminary; as Edward
Said (1983: 226) has observed, theories “travel”—that is, circulate,
transform, and differ in significance—in complex ways. We must
therefore always recognize the possibility that “a theory in one historical period and national culture becomes altogether different for
another period or situation.”
My arguments are historically and geographically contingent, situated in the context of postwar scholarship in the U.S. academy; their
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 113
application to other contexts is therefore limited. Dirlik (1996) recognizes such limits when he points out that simply pledging allegiance to
a China-centered approach denies significance to approaches of Western origin that have been appropriately applied or adapted in Chinese
and larger regional contexts. For example, the concept of modernization has taken on new meanings as deployed by the state and the intelligentsia in China and in the newly industrializing economies. A thorough commentary on the use of the marketing systems and
macroregion models in China would situate the analysis in the context
of debates unfolding among local scholars; here I can only raise a few
points and questions toward a full comparison of the models’ reception in the two academies.
An obvious difference is in political contexts. In the 1970s, when
the macroregion scholarship was first published, Chinese scholars in
the social sciences were steeped in Marxist theory and in large part
engaged in applied work to support the socialist planned economy.
Indeed, Chinese geographers have often worked as state planners. It
would have been difficult to translate location theory, based in neoclassical economics, into terms congruent with theories then domi37
nant in China. Thus, Chinese interest in systems theory and modernization theory increased in the 1980s (Wang, 1996), a generation after
its apogee in the United States, for in China under reform, scholars
have the opportunity to pursue methods and subjects suited to emergent market economic activity and industrialization. The marketing
systems (Skinner, 1998) and macroregion (Skinner, 1991) models
were published in translation in monograph editions in China soon
thereafter, which suggests that these approaches may now be drawing
more attention from Chinese scholars. Indeed, contemporary scholarship shows increased engagement with Skinner’s work (see Jiang,
n.d., 1993; Wang Di, 1993; Fan Yijun, 1998; Xu Tan, 1999; Zhang
Yan, 1999; Ren Fang and Du Qihong, 2000). While these works are
representative of current scholarship in China, some of these scholars
have also trained, worked, and published internationally; thus, their
scholarship reaches beyond the national academy as a bounded container of interest.
Scholars working in China and those in the larger sphere of Chinese-language scholarship are also carefully scrutinizing the models.
Jiang Hongliang, who notes that Skinner’s work was introduced to
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114 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
China in the 1970s (Jiang, 1993: 212), has identified contemporary
collaborative projects that employ central place theory, which would
appear to further confirm the recent upsurge of interest in these models
in China. Fan Yijun (1998), at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, has
established that the study of market towns was the main theme among
Ming and Qing dynasty historians during the 1980s; he evaluates five
general approaches and views Skinner’s work as suited to studying the
distribution of market towns, their networks, and their hierarchies.
Fan appropriately distinguishes this spatial approach from research on
the origins and definitions of market towns, their rise and decline, their
functions and activities, and their effects and significance. Wang Di’s
(1993) monograph on the upper Yangzi macroregion, which treats a
single macroregion broadly, is an important addition to the scholarship; it provides a far-reaching assessment of social, economic, and
cultural conditions in the region during the Qing. Unlike Skinner’s
original presentation of the macroregion, Wang’s study assesses
aspects of culture and society that inform spatial processes and details
how increased economic activity extended beyond the macroregional
boundaries. Ren Fang and Du Qihong, in assessing marketing and
regional systems models, both laud the scientific approach at the basis
of the models and point out their limitations. They urge scholars to use
scientific methods and to produce innovative (chuangxin) scholarship
that surpasses (chaoyue) those in the Skinner models (Ren Fang and
Du Qihong, 2000: 111). They affirm Skinner’s contribution to social
and economic history in China, but they caution that the models do not
provide a general approach, focusing on those aspects that limit their
utility. For example, they identify several fields of interest to social
and economic historians, including population composition and
income levels, that are better addressed by other methods: location
theory, rooted in neoclassical economics, assumes that populations
are undifferentiated and income is evenly distributed. They also question the logic of the macroregion boundaries, especially the boundary
38
between the lower Yangzi and the southeast coast macroregions.
Chinese scholars are fleshing out their studies with a good deal of
empirical support. One important study is Jiang Hongliang’s revisionist analysis of market towns in Sichuan. Like Szymanski and Agnew,
Jiang (1993: 212) has been interested in the empirical analysis on
which the marketing systems model is based, especially in determin-
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 115
ing the market hierarchy and delimiting the marketing areas in Jintang
County. He focuses on the contemporary “nodality” of rural centers,
where nodes are determined by the total value of sales and services,
and on the dynamic history of market formation: how they are initiated, how their schedules change, and how they cease to operate. In
analyzing historical markets, Jiang sought to confirm Skinner’s map
of periodic markets in 1949-1950 (Skinner, 1964: 22). Instead, he
found some of the data at odds with the marketing systems model. In
particular, Jiang shows that the 1949-1950 map misplaced and likely
misclassified one market, included one defunct market, and omitted
another market (Jiang, 1993: 215-17). In a map based on a data set of
nineteen spatially interrelated markets, the placement of just three
markets matters—especially as they affect the k value, which indicates the number of lower order markets that each market dominates.
The k value can vary, but Christaller (1933, 1966) proposed that k values, once established, remain constant throughout the hierarchy. In his
analysis of Sichuan, Skinner reported a market hierarchy of k = 4,
whereas Jiang’s findings indicate three different possible k values,
depending on the market town under consideration. These results
underscore Jiang’s initial premise that the study area examined for the
marketing systems model was too small to accurately determine the
pattern of marketing centers. They also suggest the benefits of a methodological approach less Christallerian than Löschian, since Lösch
proposed a more flexible approach, with different possible market
area structures (see n. 10, below).
Geographers in the Chinese academy, unlike historians, have not
demonstrated a pattern of recent interest in these models. A few studies citing Skinner’s interpretation of central place theory have
appeared in the journal Economic Geography (Jingji dili), but this
work mirrors the Anglo-American geographical literature in its focus
on placing Skinner’s work in the broader context of location theory
and changing paradigms in human geography (see Gao Songfan,
1988; Yang Wuyang, 1988; Liu Shenghe, 1991). The renowned historical geographer Tan Qixiang (1911-1992) has addressed questions
about both patterns and processes in China’s historical geography; his
work ranged from serving as editor in chief of the multivolume Historical Atlas of China (Zhongguo lishi dili ji) to pursuing studies of physical regions, human-environment relations, migration and trade
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116 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
routes, and provincial transformations. In studies of Beijing, Hainan,
Hunan, Shanghai, and Zhejiang, Tan demonstrated a preference for
regional research based on the political unit of the province, as he
focused on the evolution of administrative geographies (see
Benkanbian chubu, 1990; Tan Qixiang, 1999). He also led projects
investigating physical regions and human-environment relations,
notably an analysis of the northeast region (Tan Qixiang, 1988) and an
edited collection on the Yellow River (Tan Qixiang, 1986). His concern for careful use of historical sources resulted in essays about local
histories (difang zhi) (see Tan Qixiang, 1987; Benkanbian chubu,
1990).
While the general question being raised here is the nature of the
influence of marketing systems and macroregion models in China, in
the case of Tan Qixiang’s body of work, we perhaps should ask instead
about his influence on historical geographical research outside China.
Certainly his research is informed by regional methods and local histories, which were sources of primary data for the marketing systems
model and provide a distinctive grounding for a “China-centered”
approach. Yet Tan did not engage with the marketing and macroregion
studies—predictably, because by and large, his regional research concerned the historical transformation of regions. He was interested in
regional processes, not in mapping spatial patterns. The importance of
the distinction between patterns and processes cannot be overstated:
the former give rise to questions of spatial distribution and areal differentiation, while the latter give rise to questions of transformation and
causality. Furthermore, and more critically, the workings of spatial
processes cannot be determined by knowledge of spatial patterns.
Recalling that location theory is ahistorical in approach and concerns
the spatial distribution of settlements, we can conclude that the marketing systems and macroregion models have developed without
needing to incorporate such qualitative historical sources.
PARADOXES, REDIRECTIONS, ALTERNATIVES
Some of the problems associated with the marketing systems and
macroregion models demonstrate not weaknesses of the models themselves but problems of research design, which suggest the use of other
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 117
methodologies. One of the most interesting problems is raised by the
position that inadequate interregional transportation prevented the
emergence of a national market until after 1895, when the Treaty of
Shimonoseki presumably made it possible to construct the necessary
transportation infrastructure. But considerable interregional trade in
some products—notably grain, cotton, silk, tea, and salt—took place
before 1895, especially along the Grand Canal and the Yangzi River
(Wu Chengming, 1983; Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, 1985, 2000).
By adopting 1895 as a turning point, when “cities were linked by
steamer, railroad, or improved roads to centers of industrial production” (Skinner, 1965a: 213), Skinner interpreted location theory to suit
the assumption that regions were minimally connected. But location
models originally grew out of the industrial era: Alfred Weber’s model
of industrial location concerned precisely the evolving landscape of
railroad and road transportation. Central place theory, like the
core-periphery distinction underlying regional systems theory, was
first applied to a Western agricultural landscape of the industrial era. If
location theory illuminates the historical spatial characteristics of settlement patterns in China, that explanatory power should not be fundamentally compromised by the construction of a railroad.
This issue of a national market raises a range of questions. What
determines the existence of such a market? Does the presumed
absence of a national market in China at the turn of the nineteenth century imply modern Western definitions of national economy? How, in
the absence of a national market, should long-distance trade in a variety of commodities be explained? Why do the marketing systems and
macroregion models pay little attention to important interprovincial
and interregional trade routes?
REDIRECTIONS
The macroregion model usefully suggested the idea of the watershed and the regional cores and peripheries as alternatives to the province for subnational regional analysis. Yet the spatial structure embedded in the macroregion perspective discourages investigations into
processes of economic activity and interrelations between different
regional formations and interrelated spatial processes, such as activities that cross regional boundaries in long-distance and maritime
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118 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
trade. Another contemporaneous approach to Chinese regions and
urban economic systems, Gilbert Rozman’s (1973) study of urban networks in Qing China, addresses some of these questions.39 Examining
the evolution of urban hierarchies and systems of cities, Rozman notes
that by early Qing times, there was a national market: “a national market exists when prices of items of mass consumption in principal cities
of different regions are interrelated” (Rozman, 1973: 128). The urban
networks approach recognizes the interregional trade in numerous
commodities, as markets in key products and manufactured goods tied
the largest mercantile centers into a larger scale network. The national
market had its historic roots in the Ming dynastic era, when huiguan
(native-place associations) began to emerge in major cities; during the
Ming-Qing transition, growing commercialization resulted in
increased numbers and types of mercantile and commercial organizations (Peng Zeyi, 1995). This larger scale perspective makes possible
the realization that merchant organizations and networks were different from the commodity retailing taking place at local periodic markets; merchants dealing in silks and porcelain were trading through
40
larger cities and represented a different socioeconomic stratum.
In his analysis of long-distance trade through Hankou, Rowe
(1984: 60) contrasts the Chinese scholarship on this issue, which
observes the existence of an integrated national market by the middle
of the eighteenth century, with Skinner’s position, which relies on the
transport constraints assumed in location theory in claiming that interregional trade volumes were not high. Looking at economic activity in
Hankou and the important tea trade, Rowe identifies five principal
interregional trade routes in the nineteenth century and finds that the
city was more actively engaged with other large mercantile centers
41
than with its local marketing system. Rozman (1973: 130-33) also
emphasizes that the emergent national market was based in long-distance trade, and he identifies fifteen principal transportation routes.
These important connections between large mercantile centers represent urban networks spatially inscribed by dynamic transboundary
forms of economic practice and social organization, and such perspectives suggest how to separate a historically specific national market
from largely Western-defined conditions of industrial development.
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 119
As Timothy Brook (1988) has observed, transregional merchants
traveled on the stage routes of a courier service maintained by the
state, and transregional travel for both commercial and leisure purposes became common enough by the middle of the Ming that a new
genre of writing appeared, the route book. The emphasis on mobility
and networks is also in step with contemporary approaches to historical and modern business and economic organization in Asia (e.g.,
Hamilton, 1991), as well as the organization of firms and their branches
that constitute local and regional economies (e.g., Yeung, 2000). This
approach would also appear to incorporate the conclusions of the historian Fu Yiling (1956, 1957), who made the case that commercialization increased in the urban Jiangnan region during the Ming dynasty,
as traveling merchants from port cities played a role in organizing
commercial activities. The work of Wu Chengming (1983; see also Xu
Dixin and Wu Chengming, 1985, and its abridged English translation,
Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, 2000) has drawn considerable attention to the growth in long-distance trade in the Ming and Qing periods.
He has identified the geographical patterns of this trade, describing
ten transregional land and maritime trade routes that tied producing
regions with centers of concentrated consumption (Wu Chengming,
1983: 104-6). During the Ming period, most long-distance trade was
north-south and generally conveyed luxury goods, whereas during the
Qing, trade flows tended to be east-west and expanded to include more
basic commodities. Thus, trade routes in- creasingly crisscrossed
China and connected mercantile centers. The macroregion paradigm,
in contrast, did not emphasize transregional economic activities and
rarely resulted in transregional studies, though Skinner himself has
occasionally underscored the importance of social and economic
mobility in the evolution of a national market (e.g., Skinner, 1976).
Given the insights afforded by the network approach, it may seem
surprising that the merits of highlighting networked long-distance
trade did not received greater notice. Mote (1995: 75) has explained
that “Rozman’s systematic analysis is largely ignored . . . probably
because Skinner’s far more ambitious schematization has denied to all
other conceptualizations the status of alternatives to his influential
efforts to define the ‘only reasonable’ way to study Chinese urban-
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120 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
ism.” I would point instead to the larger problem of schisms in scholarly practice between area studies and the disciplines and between
area studies and theory, which structure research and affect the evolution of paradigms.
A final example of empirical research demonstrates the fundamental differences that shape the macroregion and urban networks
approaches. David Johnson’s (1985) work on the proliferation of city
god temples portrays, in two maps (summarized in Map 2), the first
appearance of city god temples in important commercial settlements
in the Jiangnan region. The first city god temple was likely built in
Suzhou in the eighth century. The southern outlier of the earliest temples was in Fuzhou; the northernmost was in Tang dynasty Songzhou,
in contemporary eastern Henan province. By the thirteenth century,
city god temples had spread considerably but not nationally. Concentrated in the Jiangnan region, they expanded to the south along trade
routes and river valleys. They also appeared in the north in the Yellow
River valley and along major trade routes, but they remained primarily
a southern phenomenon. Some city god temples were located in
county capitals, but they “were much more likely to be located in prefectural or other higher-level administrative centers” (Johnson, 1985:
399).
Johnson (1985) attributes these patterns to increased commercial
activity and the region’s population growth driven by commercial
expansion during the Tang and Song dynasties, correlating the establishment of city god temples and the three fastest growing
macroregions—the middle Yangzi, lower Yangzi, and southeast coast
(Johnson, 1985: 410-11). Yet the spatial processes by which the temples proliferated were likely transregional since their pattern of diffusion seems to demonstrate merchant connections between higher level
settlements, especially at the prefectural level and above. We are thus
reminded of Pred’s (1973) conclusions about information diffusion in
systems of cities: innovations regularly passed most quickly between
higher level cities via processes that were not bound by discrete
regional systems. Johnson connects the spread of city god temples to
newly empowered merchant elites, whose increased mobility also
encouraged the establishment of huiguan.
In a much later work on the Lingnan macroregion, Skinner (1994)
introduced the importance of innovation diffusion, based on research
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 121
by Torsten Hägerstrand (1966), a colleague of Pred. In this project to
revisit the macroregion, Skinner uses contemporary data on indicators
of development, including mechanization in the agricultural sector,
electricity supply, illiteracy, farm income, household size, and more,
to map seven differential levels of development, from an inner core to
a far periphery. This work takes advantage of the wealth of new data
available, but the analysis does not redress the dearth of data for a central place analysis, as discussed above. This new analysis of Lingnan
maps relative modernization in quantitative terms and so moves further away from questions about local culture and institutions; similarly, it does not engage transnational dimensions of regional change.
It does provide an informational alternative to the province for poten42
tial planning purposes.
ALTERNATIVES
The “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences has enlivened geographical imaginations in academic research. Some of the
new scholarship makes considerable use of geographical and spatial
metaphors, as seen in the increased use of the words mapping, cartographies, and -scapes, as well as related imagery. While metaphorical
approaches are often interesting, some geographers have warned of
their tendency to mask or confuse actual spatial and place-based conditions and processes (see Smith and Katz, 1993; Gibson-Graham,
1996: 72-75; Harvey, 2000). The theoretical foundations of the spatial
turn have also influenced geographers: contemporary approaches in
human geography concerned with material geographies have increasingly addressed dynamic spatial processes, including regional formation, relations of scale, the concept of place, and place- based identities. These approaches, as I will briefly sketch below, are of great
potential use to research in China area studies.
In the midst of the debates over a new regional geography, Anssi
Paasi (1986, 1991) formulated an approach to historical regional evolution, the “institutionalization of regions.” An institutionalized region—
such as a state, province, county, or other territorial unit—has become
territorialized over time. Institutionalization occurs through the constitution of territorial shape, or boundary making; the formation of territorial symbols, including flags, regional folksongs, and similar
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122 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
discourses, texts, and paraphernalia; the emergence of institutions that
operate in the context of that territory, such as local governmental systems; and the continuing reestablishment of the region through social
processes, including economic activities within the region and the creation and reproduction of regional identities. This approach
historicizes regional evolution and finds cultural meaning in localized
identity formation. Applying this regional evolution approach to the
Romanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, Jouni Häkli (1994)
locates within them subregions where actual processes of
institutionalization had taken place. His examination of the rise of systems of landholding, taxation, and census taking shows how villages
that had once been relatively autonomous were drawn into an administrative territory. Such a perspective strikes me as particularly useful in
assessing long-term regional stability, especially as regards the formation of the provinces in eastern China.
Regions have also become central subjects of analysis for political
scientists and economists studying world economic activity, as alternatives to nation-state spatialities. In theories of economic organization, regions have taken on a new role: rather than being considered a
result of more fundamental economic processes, they are treated
instead as the basis of economic organization and social life (Storper,
1997). Scholars have explained the recent emphasis on the region by
pointing to complex processes of globalization: regions, rather than
nation-states, are becoming units of economic analysis and the territorial spheres most suited to the coalescence of political, social, and economic processes (Tomaney and Ward, 2000). Discussion of a possible
“new regionalism” is predictably emanating from Europe, but it has
relevance worldwide as transhistorical regions and regional economies are recognized. Tomaney and Ward (2000) have identified several aspects of the new regionalism that cut across social, cultural, economic, political, and physical-environmental spheres. Principal
elements include regional economic restructuring, regional consciousness and regional identity, new forms of regional governance, and growing interest in the environmental sustainability of
the region. Several of these issues—regional economic restructuring, new powers of regional governance, and the dynamic transformation of regional identities—have been raised by regional processes
in China at different historical junctures.
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 123
A collaborative project from the Open University, Rethinking the
Region (Allen, Massey, and Cochrane, 1998), has examined the evolution of the contemporary subnational region in southeast England surrounding London as both a political economic entity and a discursive
geography, reproduced for the 1990s under the neoliberal regime inherited from the years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. The project focuses on the mechanisms of growth in this “growth region.” But
it does not measure or map growth, and the region is defined without
the use of boundaries:
Once drawn, such lines of containment convey the impression that all
the social relations relevant to an understanding of growth in the region
fall neatly within the boundaries. The result, effectively, is to empty the
region of meaning and to fix its changing geography. [Allen, Massey,
and Cochrane, 1998: ix]
An unbounded regional geography thus helps us understand the range
of empirical realities of economic life as well as the social construction of regional meaning—because many of the issues at stake in contemporary regions are transboundary in nature, connected to nationaland world-scale issues. This project also shows how research on
high-growth regions, such as coastal China under reform, has tended
to mask or at best marginalize a range of issues (and problems) pertaining to uneven growth and income distribution. In contrast, Rethinking the Region views a high-growth region as also a “discontinuous region” of locally uneven development and even poverty. These
regional approaches recognize that locally constituted social processes result in particular kinds of spatial processes and urban and regional formations.
A current shift in the field of economic geography known as the
“cultural turn” has generated interesting work that specifically
addresses the interrelated importance of cultural and economic conditions in regional formations. In economic geography, the idea of a
regional cultural economy has emerged from the conviction that political economy must be rethought: it “must employ cultural terms like
symbol, imaginary, and rationality if it is to understand crucial economic processes such as commodification, industrialization, and
development” (Peet, 2000: 1215). Moreover, researchers must
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124 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
recognize, as Arjun Appaduri (2000: 13) insists, how “regions also
imagine their own worlds.” In the regional cultural economy, “economic imagination derives from the cultural history of a people”
(Peet, 1997: 38); that is, ideas characteristic of regional populations
take social forms and help shape particular economic strategies. The
culture-economy split in social thought, paralleled in traditional
regional geography— which sets systematic or functional regions,
distinguished by economic activity, against unique regions, distinguished by local culture and ways of life—has obscured the connections between these topics. In considering the regional cultural economy, one must overcome such divides and employ a unified
perspective in analysis, bringing together cultural and economic subjects and concerns about both the cultural conditions and spatial processes of the regional economy.
One of the historical problems in defining regions is the issue of
scale: regions may exist at various scales, from the continental to the
subnational and subprovincial. Yet this problem also demonstrates the
significance of the region’s spatiality—its ability to occupy different
scale positions. One way of approaching the issue dynamically is by
focusing on relations of scale, a process-oriented concept that frames
an understanding of interconnected spatial scales of activity. Such
attention to scale can help explain the actual workings of social and
economic processes through a spatial hierarchy, moving from local to
regional, national, and international levels of concern. It enables one
to substitute careful material geographies for the labels “local” and
“global,” a distinction that often acknowledges complex scaled processes without accounting for them. The most common type of scale is
administrative, but scale exists irrespective of bounded territorial area.
Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) thinking on the dynamic qualities of state
formation encompasses both general scale positions and administrative scale as he addresses how the state stabilizes and adjusts
scale—global, national, regional, and local—as a strategy of accumu43
lation. On this account, the state orchestrates the scaled properties of
institutions to make capital circulate rapidly and to ensure its accumulation among elites who command scale and its associated powers.
These ideas help explain China’s long-term territorial coherence. The
scaled administrative system of imperial China worked to stabilize the
regions and knit the empire into a coherent whole. That stability,
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 125
however, was not a static geography of bounded territories but active
and highly managed; it was the basis of the empire’s massive accumulation regime, especially through taxation (in kind and later in cash),
as the state commanded and organized grain tribute from administrative territories to the capital. This spatial process won the commitment
of officials in part because it mirrored their own desires: the imperial
system also presented scaled opportunities through a tiered set of official examinations whose sequential passage earned appointments at
correspondingly higher levels of scale in the urban hierarchy. The
extraordinary longevity of the Chinese empire arguably resulted from
brilliant scale strategies, as imperial power was dynamically managed
at all administrative levels.
In many ways, the spatiality of the reform era has reflected the
state’s loosening its control over administrative scale. Decentralization of power to the provinces—especially fiscal decentralization, as
provinces have been allowed to keep a greater portion of their own revenue—has challenged the strength of the central government. Yet
arguably the difference now is not the center’s loss of power per se but
the greater flexibility permitted between levels of administrative
scale, as the state has simultaneously opened up nationally to allow all
44
levels greater intersection with global economic activity. One reform
era policy to facilitate economic growth, chexian gaishi (abolishing
counties and establishing cities), “scaled up” counties to the level of
cities, with the independent power to contract larger foreign investment and decide on new land use (Zhang and Zhao, 1998). What
remains unchanged is that these policies are also accumulation strategies, new articulations of scale and administrative geography adjusted
by the state to increase production and promote economic growth in
China under reform. As Erik Swyngedouw (1997: 169) has explained,
“The theoretical and political priority, therefore, never resides in a particular geographical scale, but rather in the process through which particular scales become (re)constituted.” Feminist geographer Linda
McDowell (1999) has organized a book by relations of scale, in chapters about the household and the community, workplace, and nation,
and how human spatial processes work through these scales.
A less conventional approach to scale is found in Neil Smith’s
(1993: 101) work on homelessness, which incorporates the body in “a
sequence of scales: body, home, community, urban, nation, global.”
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126 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
The scale of the body is what “marks the boundary between self and
other in a social as much as a physical sense, and involves the construction of a ‘personal space’in addition to a literally defined physiological space” (Smith, 1993: 102). This definition may be used to create a set of scaled places, especially one based on class, as appeared in
China after 1949 when the Communist Party recategorized citizens
and social institutions as rich peasants, middle peasants, landlords,
petty capitalists, national capitalists, workers, intellectuals, religious
practitioners, criminal elements, and so on. The state’s labels created
social relations and spatial contexts in which people associated class
differences with different kinds of places and the people whose activities constituted those places.
To understand place and what constitutes place-based meaning, we
45
must ask how societies make place out of space. Massey’s (1995: 63)
contemporary conceptualization of place depends on understanding
that relationship, as she argues that places are formed in the “spatial
reach of social relations.” She proposes a “progressive sense of place”
and “global sense of place”; on her account, places bear a mixture of
characteristics derived from social relations connected to other scales
of activity. Place can be thought of in terms of social interactions, links
to sometimes quite distant places, and diverse and conflicted
place-based identities. Place thus becomes much more than a location
on the ground: it is a constellation of opportunities for social interaction, the intersection of diverse moments in people’s lives in which
meaning is constituted.
In the Chinese cultural imagination, difang (place) is of course a
significant transhistorical force of geographical orientation and individual and group identity formation. Some of these conceptual qualities of place appear in Bryna Goodman’s (1995: 5) study of huiguan in
Shanghai:
For migrants who sought a living in Shanghai, native-place identity
expressed both spiritual linkages to the place where their ancestors
were buried and living ties to family members and community. These
ties were most frequently economic as well as sentimental, for local
communities assisted and sponsored individual sojourners, viewing
them as economic investments for the community.
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 127
Here place identity appears as a geographical imagining, a sentiment
reenacted by travelers in diverse places. Place is also scaled, from a
home site of ancestral ties to community, county, city, and province,
since huiguan commonly represented provincial-level associations.
The second sentence of the quote appears to exemplify Massey’s “spatial reach of social relations,” suggesting how place in Han Chinese
society has been both a physical location (especially bounded and
scaled villages, counties, and cities) and a concept of spatial social
relations.
These ideas from contemporary disciplinary literature, which I discuss further elsewhere (Cartier, 2001), are useful across the social sciences and humanities; though derived in part from Western social theory, their foregrounding of human relations in the context of spatial
settings is potentially applicable in diverse cultural contexts. As ever,
it is the business of area studies specialists to rely on deep knowledge
of their areas to assess the suitability of new methodological
approaches. Ultimately, the exercise of ethical judgment in creating
and presenting scholarship is what differentiates the mere recycling of
material from the production of knowledge.
The methodology of contemporary theory in geography differs
from that of location theory and traditional regional geography in its
emphasis on social processes over spatial patterns. Central place theory also included elements of spatial scale (i.e., the hierarchy of market towns), but in a spatial-structural rather than a process-oriented
form. In addition, central place theory did not incorporate elements of
political and institutional embeddedness, on which societal formation
is based (Brook, 1985). For example, the Qing institution of the eight
governors-generalship, six of which had jurisdiction over two to three
provinces, bear some correspondence with the macroregions and
46
might lend historic importance to the concept. Market towns in Chinese history certainly remain a viable subject of study, and Jiang
Hongliang’s (1993) analysis suggests that the complexities of the economic landscape require similarly complex or diverse theoretical
approaches. Within location theory, Lösch worked to overcome some
of the limits of central place theory as originally advanced by Christaller. Among contemporary studies, Fan Yijun (1998) demonstrates
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128 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
the importance of different approaches to research on market towns. A
range of methods also characterizes contemporary regional analysis,
which gives new importance to formulating research design and
selecting methodology. Regional analysis is no longer necessarily
based on the bounded territorial region, and questions have shifted to
concentrate on processes of regional formation, regional rise and
decline, and comparative regional analysis. An important early precursor of such current interests is Chi’s (1936) Key Economic Areas in
Chinese History, which recognized that over the longue durée, different economic regions assumed the position of primary importance on
the imperial scene. We have seen such shifts in China under reform, as
the southern coastal provinces have become more significant because
of their rapid economic growth. China’s economic planning
regions—such as the Maoist era “Third Front” region for large-scale
strategic investment and the tripartite scheme of eastern coastal, central, and western regions used in China under reform—also serve as
important frameworks of regional analysis. These examples of
regionalization in China, taken with current research in geography
more broadly, suggest the different possibilities for methods of
regional analysis and underscore that regional research now is focusing on regional processes.
To finally return to the more general concerns with which I began:
to the extent that there is a crisis in area studies, it reflects a larger set
of questions about modern epistemologies and their adequacy for
negotiating the complexities of societies in an era of globalization
(Readings, 1996; Miyoshi, 1997; Harvey, 2000). If reorganizations of
knowledge suited to a global cosmopolitanism are in order, they must
be more than multidisciplinary. They must be comprehensive, intersecting in innovative ways that break down the barriers of scholarly
practice that divide the disciplines and area studies, the humanities
and social sciences, empirical and theoretical work, and cultural and
economic spheres. Scholarship in area studies fields is especially
suited to invigorating intellectual worldviews that replace partial
knowledges with whole and situated accounts. Thus, it has not been
my intent to argue here for a particular emphasis on geographical
methods or to present a revisionist account of past methods; instead, I
wish to urge a more cosmopolitan production of knowledge that
would overcome some of these intellectual divisions and to point to
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 129
the benefits to be gained from careful comparative assessment of different fields of scholarship whose separation would otherwise limit
intellectual inquiry.
NOTES
1. This description of regional geography by a former president of the Association of
American Geographers, John Fraser Hart (1982: 23), has been seen by critics as implying a certain antitheoretical understanding of the field.
2. The work of the Berkeley geographer Carl Sauer (e.g., 1925, 1956) on human-environment relations and the cultural landscape definitively established the inadequacies of environmental determinism as a methodology.
3. For example, Frances V. Moulder (1977) applied world systems theory to the case of
early modern East Asia, but her study was faulted for failing to grasp local social and cultural
conditions.
4. Other social theorists might arguably be added to such a list, especially from earlier eras,
but as the geographer David Harvey (1985: 5) observes of their predecessors, “There has been a
strong and almost overwhelming predisposition to give time and history priority over space and
geography. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Marshall all have that in common.”
5. The term time-space derives from the work of the Swedish geographer Torsten
Hägerstrand on contextual theory; see Pred (1977).
6. For general discussions of location theory, see Butler (1980) and Lloyd and Dicken
(1972).
7. Like world systems theory, these models are limited by their failure to take into account
local social formations and human agency. Thus, Farquhar and Hevia (1993: 496) point out that
applications of Skinner’s regional marketing systems approach tend to result in “a firm distinction between the domains of social institutions, economic processes, and culture.”
8. Indeed, in the 1940s, Christaller further developed his ideas on central place theory to
assist National Socialist regional planning (Rössler, 1989). The Nazi regime had plans for constructing new German cities elsewhere in a conquered Europe, and the state harnessed central
place theory to plan settlements and supply geopolitical propaganda.
9. This link between the system and a political territory became particularly useful to
National Socialist planning; it has also served the interests of area studies, which makes the
nation-state the primary geographical unit of analysis.
10. Many economic geographers have commented that the more flexible and complex system of central places devised by Lösch is more sophisticated and realistic than the Christallerian
hierarchy (see, e.g., Lloyd and Dicken, 1972: 421; Harvey, 1996: 58-59). Agnew (1990: 5) is
among those who believe that “market areas, especially those linked through long-distance
trade, and characterized by uneven population densities, may be better thought about in
Löschian rather than Christallerian terms.” Yet in the introduction to volume 1 of Regional Analysis, Carol Smith (1976: 15) calls “the real world . . . more Christallerian than Löschian.”
11. Mote (1995: 66) offers a more strident criticism:
We can speak of a Skinnerian age in studies of Chinese urban history in the last two or
three decades, under which many historians believe that his system provides the only
reasonable basis for analyzing all urban, in fact most social phenomena. It is fair to
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130 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
note that in the seventeen years since Skinner first adumbrated his brilliantly suggestive hypotheses, they have in many minds (perhaps also in Skinner’s) hardened into
something resembling an iron-clad law of Chinese history. The Skinner system’s elevation to the status of doctrine has had the effect of tending to divide the field into
those who accept it as established truth, and those who find it in part erroneous and
therefore reject it in toto.
Mote also notes that no comprehensive focused reviews of the models have been published,
nor have any systematic retrospectives on Skinner’s body of work taken place.
12. As Lloyd and Dicken (1972: 92) noted, after the 1960s, when central place theory was
applied to industrialized economies, interest shifted from marketing towns to marketing systems
in developing and nonindustrial countries. In an overview of such work, Carol Smith (1976: 15)
claimed that “one notable feature of the classical central-place patterns is that they seem to be
more often founded in agrarian societies, where central places are periodic and traders are
mobile.” But as various geographers have concluded, “Most peasant marketing systems just do
not fit the classical central place patterns”; indeed, “Skinner’s findings were an aberration”
(Knox and Agnew, 1989: 71).
13. In this regard, the marketing systems model also represented a partial answer to the challenge left by Max Weber, who saw the Chinese urban system as affording only a limited base for
economic expansion.
14. As Graeme Johnson (1998) notes, Skinner was forced out of Sichuan by the war; Philip
Huang (1985: 24) points out that his fieldwork in Kao-tien-tzu (Gaodianzi) lasted only three
months.
15. For example, reports from septuagenarian informants in Shandong led Huang (1985:
221) to conclude that social dealings at the marketplace did not include the multitude of activities
reported by Skinner. Huang’s informants explained their interactions in market towns as kan
renao (watching the hustle and bustle); they did not initiate conversation with strangers from outside their own village. Potter and Potter, in their study of rural society in Guangdong (1990), also
found that standard marketing towns had less social significance than Skinner had theorized,
concluding that “regional variation cannot be an adequate explanation for the deviation from theoretical expectation, and the theory itself must be reevaluated” (Potter and Potter, 1990: 157).
Siu (forthcoming), drawing on David Faure’s work in Foshan, has urged scholars to rethink how
people at local levels have politically and culturally engaged the state, taking into account the
limited role of local agency in the hierarchy of central places defined by Skinner. Still other historians (e.g., P. Kuhn, 1970; Hsieh, 1974) have embraced Skinner’s assumption about the role of
markets to explain how people in villages and standard marketing towns could organize beyond
their own settlement areas in times of distress (see Rowe, 1985: 259).
16. Hodder (1993: 38) further critiques the research design embedded in the marketing systems model, concluding that “an impenetrable circle of mutually reinforcing assumptions”
about the relationships between settlements and markets had been inappropriately accepted as
proven facts.
17. Yang (1944: 17) identified circular and square market areas in his study of periodic markets in Shandong. Two studies on settlement patterns in densely populated agricultural regions
attempted to locate the hexagonal patterns of settlements. Lo (1986), in a study of the north
China plain, and Chiu and Leung (1983), in an examination of the Gaohe area in Guangdong,
reach similar conclusions: towns were more likely to be located in linear arrangements along
streams, canals, and roads than in the Christallerian hierarchy. Hodder has also argued, based on
work by Jiang Hongliang (n.d.), that Skinner’s (1964: 22-23) maps of the Sichuan marketing
towns are distorted to favor hexagonal patterns: “the area selected by Skinner is taken out of the
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 131
context of a larger area: relationships between rural centres inside the boundary defined by Skinner and rural centres outside that boundary are ignored” (Hodder, 1993: 36).
18. Some applications of the model did not follow its prescriptions. Keith Schoppa’s (1982)
innovative study of Zhejiang included portions of two macroregions.
19. The data set for this aspect of the model, an analysis of China’s cities in 1893, reportedly
occupied “2,500 data cards” (Skinner, 1977c: 221), but few of the associated figures identify
their sources, and the data are otherwise unreported.
20. Many accounts of China’s national economy have failed to take into account the importance of the junk trade. In his substantial study of the role of maritime trade in China’s modern
economic history, Takeshi Hamashita (1989) points out that H. B. Morse’s (1908) calculations of
China’s national economy did not include the junk trade.
21. Little and Esherick’s (1989) analysis of the macroregion concludes that the model does
not fundamentally bar consideration of interregional trade. This is true, as Pred’s research
(which I discuss later) makes clear. Yet problems remain, because of the way in which the
macroregion model evolved from central place theory and because the theoretical assumptions
of central place theory ignore long-distance trade. See also the conclusion of this article, “Paradoxes, Redirections, Alternatives.”
22. Skinner (1977a: 277) acknowledged that central place theory “in the strict sense is concerned solely with retailing.”
23. In the trading economies of the southeast coast, profits accrued to merchants who reinvested in diverse forms of capital, including the port and urban infrastructure of their home
towns. Such investment fueled the growth of the coastal port cities, transforming their built environments with roadways, waterworks, and other modern infrastructures in advance of other cities in China.
24. Lilienfeld traces the growth of systems theory from its origins in biology and physics to
its spread, especially to information science fields. In his final chapter, “Systems Theory as Ideology” (Lilienfeld, 1978: 247-83), he also describes systems theory as “peculiarly American”—a reflection of postwar American technocratic society and values. He argues that the basic
characteristics—and inherent limitations—of all systems theories are revealed in their theoretical conceptualization. First, systems are demarcated by clear boundaries; as a corollary, they are
assumed to exist as closed systems of elements. Second (especially in the natural sciences), “relevant factors” within the system are selected for analysis. In this way, the system becomes a scientifically constructed version of some arbitrary reality. In addition, all factors within the system
are assumed to be interconnected. Third, scholars have regularly deployed systems as agents:
that is, to say, systems analysis attributes purpose or agency to systems (which exist for some reason) rather than to people.
25. For an early critique of the rank-size rule, see also Berry (1961). In a study of European
urban systems based on comparative methodological approaches, de Vries (1984: 91) concluded
that use of the rank-size rule by Skinner, among others, weakened the empirical analysis of
city-size distributions.
26. Modeling cores and peripheries is also associated with the work of Friedmann (1966) on
regional development policy in Venezuela.
27. What alternative mappings of the regions might result if China scholars convened a
workshop devoted to understanding and mapping regional China?
28. Especially problematic macroregion boundaries include the boundary of the lower
Yangzi macroregion, shared with the southeast coast region, and the division between the middle
and lower Yangzi regions; in both cases, economic activity regularly exceeds the regions. Also
obviously debatable is the creation of the Yungui macroregion encompassing Yunnan and part of
Guizhou, where the topography is so highly divided and differentiated that little regional
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132 MODERN CHINA / JANUARY 2002
coherence is apparent. In other cases, important cities and highly developed areas are located
without explanation in macroregion peripheries: for example, Nanchang, situated in the periphery of the middle Yangzi, and towns and cities of Su’nan in much of the lower Yangzi. I am grateful to Laurence Ma for providing these examples.
29. Wang (1995: 35) interprets central place theory as illustrating “making of places” in
China. But because the functionalist economic approach at the heart of the model treats human
behavior as ahistorical, idealized, and rational, central place theory is inappropriate for conceptualizing processes of place making. Places are created historically through local social and cultural practices and thus involve human agency, whereas location theory is a traditional subfield
of spatial analysis in geography. The word place in “central place theory” may encourage this
confusion (see also n. 45).
30. Leong’s book was published posthumously; Skinner both wrote its introduction and created its maps.
31. Skinner (1994: 19) himself, in a much later paper, admitted that his original “regional
analysis per se was a seat-of-the-pants effort relying extensively on hunches and inferences from
topography.” This perspective raises problems of environmental determinism discussed in the
text above, as well as further questions about the data analysis.
32. In a chapter titled “Town and City as Regional Centers,” Dickinson (1947: 21-51) elaborates on central place theory and argues that towns are distinguished from rural areas by their
combined economic, social, and administrative functions.
33. Chapter 5 of Harris’s (1970: 129-85) Cities of the Soviet Union, “Size Relations, Central
Places, and the Administrative Hierarchy,” uses Zipf’s (1941) work to demonstrate rank-size
relationships of cities of the Soviet Union by region.
34. Minshull (1967: 13-25) mentions Buache in his book’s first chapter, “The Regional
Method of Description,” which is a survey of historic regional approaches in geography.
35. Ironically, while area studies’ discursive strategy concealed its ties to geography, geography as a discipline suffered some of its most severe setbacks at major universities with important programs in East Asian studies. The declaration of Harvard’s president, James Conant, that
“geography is not a university subject” might seem to justify both his elimination of the department and similar actions at other institutions. But in fact, according to Neil Smith (1987), the reasons for closing Harvard’s small and fragmented department were far more complicated (it probably mattered in 1948 that one member of the department was identified as a Communist
sympathizer and another as gay). Columbia and Michigan later did away with their departments
of geography, and the department at the University of Chicago was downgraded to a program.
Geography as a discipline has subsequently staged a remarkable comeback, theoretically invigorated by the academy’s “spatial turn” in the 1970s: there have been increases in faculty lines, new
doctoral programs, and new departments.
36. Geographers also failed to examine critically the marketing systems and macroregion
models. Leading theoreticians in human geography lacked area studies expertise; moreover,
with their discipline under attack, they were eager to substantiate its importance by citing prominent examples of geographical models used in other disciplines. China geographers, as regional
specialists, were marginalized by geography’s theoretical vanguard because they practiced
so-called descriptive work, much criticized for its association with traditional regional geography; they probably viewed the application of location theory in China area studies sympathetically because it could enhance the field of China geography in the wider discipline. I am indebted
to Laurence Ma for providing these perspectives.
37. I am grateful to Frederic Wakeman for these observations on intellectual conditions in
the Chinese academy, based his participation in 1980 meetings in Beijing at which Skinner’s systems model was presented, in a paper translated by Fu-mei Chang Chen.
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Cartier / THE MACROREGION IN CHINA 133
38. In a more recent iteration, Skinner (1999: 59) has updated the macroregion system to
incorporate an analysis of contemporary city size and distribution; the only “major” boundary
shift is in the lower Yangzi macroregion, which “has expanded both to the north, incorporating a
portion of the Huai River valley, and to the south, capturing, as it were, the Ou-Ling subregion
from the Southeast Coast.” Ren Fang and Du Qihong (2000) refer to the historic conditions in
these regions, which Skinner’s update does not address.
39. The following analysis focuses on only one thread of Rozman’s larger argument. Finding that China lacked large numbers of medium-sized cities, he concluded that the urban hierarchy in China led to limited resource mobilization and thus hampered industrialization and modernization. Mann’s (1984) review of scholarship from this era on Chinese urbanization compares
Skinner’s and Rozman’s work.
40. Chang’s (1957: 13) study of merchant organizations begins by defining three general
categories of merchants on a spatial scale: rural merchants, city merchants, and long-distance
traveling merchants.
41. Rowe himself interprets these trade routes in the context of macroregions rather than
alternative spatial economic patterns.
42. I am grateful to G. William Skinner for bringing this paper to my attention and providing
a copy.
43. For a discussion of Lefebvre’s writings on scale, see Brenner (1997a, 1997b, 1999).
44. In analyzing the new roles of large cities in China under reform, Solinger (1993: 205-22)
has described the change as a scale shift from “from hierarchy to network,” as the state expects
major cities to coordinate economic activity with other cities and counties.
45. Much of the recent interdisciplinary literature using geographical ideas and tropes confuses two basic geographical concepts, space and place. Space is an abstraction; place is space
transformed and given cultural meaning by human activity. See Johnston et al. (2000).
46. I am grateful to Peter Perdue for suggesting this idea.
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Carolyn Cartier is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Globalizing South China (Blackwell, 2001) and coeditor
with Laurence J. C. Ma of The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity
(Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming).
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