Selected Works of Yang Wuyang: The Theory and Practice of Geography

Author: Yang Wuyang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: Professor Yang Wuyang is a renowned Chinese geographer and geography educator, serving as a professor and doctoral supervisor at Peking University. For half a century, Professor Yang has devoted his entire life to the cause of geography in China, making outstanding contributions in academic fields such as geography, urban and regional planning, and simultaneously cultivating a large number of talents in economic geography, urban and regional planning for the country. Professor Yang insists on the unity of geography and has proposed unique and highly influential insights on the theoreticalization of geography. As early as 1956, he wrote an article in the academic monthly Xin Jianshe (New Construction), advocating for the comprehensive unity of geography. He believed that physical geography and economic geography jointly study the Earth inhabited by humans, which is the foundation of geography as a unified discipline; regionalism is a characteristic of geography; although physical geography and economic geography belong to natural and social sciences respectively, and although disciplines within geography are still diversifying, they cannot change the comprehensive unity of geography; the needs of social life and production are the fundamental reasons for the integration of physical geography and economic geography; the combination of physical geography and economic geography can better serve national economic construction, cultural construction, and national defense construction. In the fall of 1980, when teaching "Transport Geography" to undergraduate students of the 1978 and 1979 classes, he once told us that if economic geographers have a solid foundation in physical geography, they will "gain wings like a tiger." His outstanding academic achievements, such as the natural regionalization of China's highways, the application of wind and wind direction in urban planning and industrial layout, and the regionalization of China's economy, fully reflect these academic viewpoints. The book mainly collects 36 influential papers by the author in major fields of geography theory and human geography. Among them, there are 11 papers on geographical science, 9 on regional studies, 5 on urban geography and urban planning, 8 on transport geography, and 3 on commercial geography.