'Zone Fever', the Arable Land Debate,and Real Estate Speculation: China's evolving land use regime and its geographical contradictions

State promotion of export-oriented development in China through a system of special development zones contributed to both rapid economic growth and indiscriminate reproduction of special zones. Land use transformations have resulted in significant losses of arable land, and new state policies to conserve land and control land use through the revised Land Administration Law. Critical comparison of industrial development in the special zone phenomenon and the evolving land use disposition system demonstrates contradictory domestic political and economic policies of land development, land management, and land conservation. This analysis assesses land development trends in the south China coastal zone and adopts a geographical approach to examine the spatialities of the land use regime, across the administrative hierarchy, in the nature of the distinct rural and urban land use markets, and in land monitoring problems. Problems revealed in the land disposition system demonstrate how the state's land use regime has promoted land development. New controls over land use coincided with the need to restrict service sector development in real estate and related industries at the onset of the regional economic downturn in 1997.     

The use of microspectrophotometry for the identification of pigments in small paint samples

The visible reflectance spectra of a number of common pigments are presented. These were measured between 380 nm and 900 nm in paint films using the Nanospec 10S Microspectrophotometer. This data can be used in combination with a computer program based upon simple Kubelka-Munk theory to identify the pigments in paint samples. The use of this approach in forensic science is illustrated by examples from recent cases.     

The Information Have-Less: Inequality, Mobility, and Translocal Networks in Chinese Cities

The “information have-less” is a social, economic, and political category for millions of rural-to-urban migrants and laid-off workers, who populate the vast gray zone of China's digital divide. Disengaged from institutions of agricultural and industrial production, the information have-less make use of such inexpensive ICT services as Internet cafés, prepaid phone cards, and Little Smart mobile phones. These low-end digital technologies are critical to enhancing labor mobility (both physical and social) and to the formation of “translocal networks”. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary assessment of ICT usage in, key city-regions in China and consider the consequences of translocal network formations for evolving information inequality in China. These networks raise key theoretical issues related to regionalism, mobility, and state-firm relationships that impinge on low-end service provision, and stratified patterns of information access and utilization within the have-less populations. We view translocal networks an important socio-economic asset of the information have-less and an arena for the articulation of labor mobility in China’s industrialization process and latest wave of urbanization. Carolyn Cartier is associate professor of geography at the University of Southern California. She is the author ofGlobalizing South China (Blackwell, 2001) and the co-editor with Laurence J.C. Ma ofThe Chinese Diaspora: Place Space, Mobility and Identity (Routledge, 2003). Manuel Castells is Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His current, research focuses on the social and economic implications of the Internet and the debate on new development strategies for the Information Age. Jack Linchuan Qiu is assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He co-founded and moderates the Chinese Internet Research Group, a network of researchers from the academic, policymaking, journalistic, and activist communities.