Geography of China: Environment, Resources, Population, and Development (review)

Reviews 297 licentious, and rarely consort with virtue/goodness." From the context, Confucius' critique is not against language but against the rhetorical misuse of language. As Zhang himselfpoints out later, Confucius is not against language as a mode ofinstruction (although precept and example are stressed): "As a great pedagogue, however, Confucius knew only too well that teaching was impossible without the employment ofwords, even though words might confuse and mislead diose who were being taught" (p. 31). Confucius was wary ofwords being misused; the Taoists were wary of all words. These very minor defects aside, The Tao and the Logos is an intellectual disquisition very much worth reading. There is nothing remotely like it available, and it is much needed. It is likely to become one of the seminal works on comparative poetics in this decade. Eugene Eoyang Indiana University NOTE 5 1. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems ofPhenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 1-20. Songqiao Zhao. Geography ofChina: Environment, Resources, Population, and Development. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994. 332 pp. Among scholars in various disciplines of the social sciences in the West contributing to the understanding of contemporary Chinese society, geographers probably rank among the lowest on the totem pole. There are two reasons for this lesser role: first, only about a score of geographers outside China would consider themselves serious scholars on China and publish books and articles regularly on the country; second, China has been a closed country for field-workers from abroad, including geographers who would like to do field surveys. ConsequenAy, there is a dearth of good geographic studies on China, particularly those that are suitable for use as texts for upper-division undergraduates. Against this background, this new publication by Songqiao Zhao is most wel-© 1994 by University come. Zhao is well qualified to author such a book, as he did his advanced studies of Hawai ? Press in geography in the United States in the 1940s and has been a senior geographer with the Institute of Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for more than 298 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 forty-five years. He was fhe head of fhe Division of Physical Geography in that institute and was in charge of major research projects in China, including desert research in Xinjiang and agricultural reclamation studies in Northeast China. As the discipline in China has been strongly inAuenced by Soviet geography in the 1950s, it has been best known for research in physical geography, with human and economic geography relatively undeveloped. This tendency is also reAected in the volume by Zhao. The most significant contribution of the book is the author's extensive employment of published works by Chinese geographers, mostly in Chinese. Much of this research is introduced here for fhe first time in English. Included in the references are Tan Qixiang's work on the historical geography of China, Zhu Zhenda's work on desertification in China and its control measures, Liu Dongsheng's work on loess in the middle course of the Yellow River, Zhong Gongfu's work on traditional ecosystems in Chinese agriculture, Li Wenyan and Lu Dadao's work on China's industrial development, and Ye Shunzan's work on the urbanization of China. Many of these names are new to geographers outside China although they are well known in their own country. The volume is composed of two parts. Part 1 is a general survey of the country in eleven chapters, covering physical features, natural resources, historical background, agricultural development, industry, transportation and foreign trade, population, urban development, environmental problems and natural hazards, and the land-food-population system. While most of these topics are concerns of traditional geography, the chapter on the land-food-population system relates the projected population for the year 2025 with food production trends in terms of land resources and management, constituting an innovative contribution. In the chapter on historical background, much information on cultural evolution and geographical shift as revealed by archaeological discoveries over the past forty-five years has been brought...