G.    William   Skinner

Department of Anthropology

University of California ,Davis

ABSTRACT

Most scholars treat level of development in china as a simple gradient form advanced coastal provinces to backward provinces in the western interior .      This ationwide “big picture ”model,while not wholly wrong ,is misleading as an analytical framework ,concealing far more than it reveals. The analysis presented here conceives of    Chinas social and economic landscape in terms of regional hierarchies of cities and towns ,each serving as the node of a regional or local territorial system.   Each modeled as a core—periphery structure. This approach, I argue,captures and interpretable. This talk is based on research that employs        GIS technology and uses a wide variety of socioeconomic data (for counties and townships and for cities and towns) to pursue regional analysis at three points in time since the beginning of Reform.I examine several indicators of socioeconomic development and show how each varies systematically from relatively “advanced”or “developed” or “modern” in urbanized  inner core to “backward” or “underdeveloped” or “traditional” in the rural far periphery---not within China as a whole but within each of nine macroregional economies .    Comparing spatial change during 1982—1990 with that during 1990---2000, I illustrate waves of development from the urbanized inner core of the region toward the rural periphery , a prensent these findings as evidence that hierarchical  macroregional economies are the arenas within which development processes unfold .Throughout the talk ,special attention is given the Lower        Yangzi macroregion,which encompasses Shanghai and most of  Zhejiang , Jiangsu ,and Anhui provinces.