Chinas Regional Development and Tibet

This book pursues both narrative and analytic approaches to better understand Chinas spatial economic development and its implications for Tibet. Accordingly, this book focuses on Tibet an autonomous region in the far west of China as the subject of an in-depth case study, highlighting its unique geopolitical and socioeconomic features and external and boundary conditions. Chinas great diversity in terms of physical geography, resource endowment, political economy, and ethnicity and religion has posed challenges to the studies of spatial and interprovincial issues. Indeed, the Chinese nation is far too huge and spatially diverse to be easily interpreted. The only feasible approach to analyzing it is, therefore, to divide it into smaller geographical elements so as to arrive at better insights into the countrys spatial mechanisms and regional characteristics. In this context, the book combines analytic and narrative approaches.