This from a friend.
And this came via boing boing a couple weeks ago. I used it along with this Wired News article in a class today to illustrate the top and bottom of the Chinese digital food chain.
A quick web search shows that I’m not the first person to make the connection between this late 1960’s theory and the Internet. One of Hagerstrand’s ideas is that this diffusion is really about interpersonal networks: which would make me think he would be a lot more popular.
Anyway, Princeton political economist Helen Milner discusses diffusion of the internet in a couple different conference papers. She cites other geographers, as well as a good number of sociologists.
A whole slew of folks cite him here. Even Nick Snead showed up in the results! It also shows up in the 2004 book “Geography and Technology.”
According to ‘Geography and Geographers’, this could all be seen to fit under the rubric of spatial diffusion. Oh, and don’t forget: Hagerstrand also did time geography, and that’s been applied to online ethnography.
Wu Chuan-chun abstracts the main agricultural regions. He notes extensive fence building campaigns in Nei-Monggol-Xinjiang province to improve pastures by “protecting grass cover.” One has to wonder if this created the same sorts of problems that we see in the American West after fencing in the 1800s. Manchuria (‘the Northeast’) contains the largest forest lands, as well as an extensive by-products industry (ginseng, antler roots, etc.). The North China Plain experienced disastrous flooding as the Huang He shifted course (from northern Jiangsu to central Hebei.). 60s – 80s, major flood control projects put an end to that. The middle and lower Yangtze are China’s “fish and rice country.” South China has fish raising and a “picturesque landscape” of fish ponds, mulberry trees and sugarcane. Triple cropping of rice.
Chao Sun-chiao writes about settlement and reclamation in Heilongjiang Province. (a primary consituent of Manchuria) Traditional peoples were the Soshin, who weren’t farmers. In the 400s, agriculture was imported, but by 1897 there were still only 25,000(!) people there. (They spent the late 17th century fending off the Russians.) From 1897 – 1949 there was a huge amount of “pioneer settlement”, with 3.7 millions folks there by 1930. Holy cow! A good chunk of this settlement was on reclaimed marshlands. Chao offers advice:
- Drain and build flood protection
- After 10-15 years of regular irrigation, soil moisture will be depleted, so built “supplementary irrigation”
- Control wild grasses
Thomas Weins cites FBIS reports to discuss trends in 80s agriculture. He does note changes in policies in 1978–so those were not limited to industrial sectors of the economy. Starting in 1975 (from a conference in Dazhai–a word he conflates with a brigade of farmers as well as a policy), mechanization was strongly encouraged. The biggest change in 78 was apparently a move away from Maoist self-sufficiency toward commercial farming. There was evidence of violence on the part of government workers trying to impose the new policies on farmers. A system of elected production team leaders and contracts with local governments was put in place to try to eleminate the abuses. Commercial laws were being written at the time of writing to back up the contracts. He refers to a specific Dazhai Brigade that was failing to allow private plot ownership and also to Dazhai counties.