The Geographical Transformation of China

Michael Dunford is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese academy of Sciences, Beijing. He holds degrees in Geography and Quantitative Economics, was awarded Royal Geographical Society Edward Heath Award in 2003, was editor of Regional Studies (1996-2002) and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Economic Geography and European Urban and Regional Studies. His research interests are in comparative aspects ofglobal economic development, regional economic performance and industrial change (including global value chains), He was Principal Investigator in an ESRC-funded project on Regional Economic Performance in an Enlarging Europe and at present is working on another ESRC project on Economic Inter-dependence and Comparative Regional Dynamics in Developed and Developing Economies: Trade and Regional Trajectories in China and the European Union, In 2006-2008 he participated in a succession of high-level EU-China regional policy exchanges and the Second China-Europa Forum, In 2008 he took part in an EU-China regional policy dialogue. In 2008-12 he has worked in China with GIZ on a range of economic reconstruction and poverty alleviation projects. In 2010-13 he is spending three spells as Visiting Professor at the IGSNRR. Since 2005 he has published After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change (with Lidia Greco) and numerous journal articles on growth, inequality and social cohesion, economic reconstruction, industrial development, regional differentiation in China and global convergence.

Liu Weidong is a Professor in Economic Geography and Assistant Director of IGSNRR of CAS. He is also the Deputy Director of the CAS Key Laboratory of Regional Sustainable Development Modelling, and the Team Leader of the Regional Development Report of China (eight volumes of the Report have been published in Chinese by the Commercial Press). He holds degrees in Geography (B.S. from Peking University, M.S. from CAS, and Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong), and was awarded China’s Outstanding Young Researcher Award (????????) in 2011, the first one in the area of Economic Geography. He is the current Chair of the Commission on Economic Geography of the Geographical Society of China, and a full member of the IGU Commission on Local Development. He is a member of the advisory board of Progress in Human Geography, contributing editor of Eurasian Geography & Economics, and editorial board member of Asian Geographer, as well as editorial board numbers of Chinese geographical journals. He is also one of the six General Editors of the AAG-Wiley International Encyclopaedia of Geography. He has published papers in noted international journals like Annals of AAG, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning A, and World Development. He is/was consultant to China National Development and Reform Commission, the World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. His research interests include regional development and policies in China, globalization and global production network, new information and communication technologies, and inter-regional trade.