Land Use Advantage of Different Regions in China and Its Evolvement Mechanism
中国土地利用的分区优势及其演化机制

Land use changes in different regions have profound spatial connections. In order to reveal the spatial linkage among land use changes of various provinces in China, the conception of land use advantage index is defined firstly referring to regional advantage theory in economics, and a method (D = ) is established to measure the index. Based on the index, land use data, and production value published in statistical yearbook, landuse advantage of different regions in China and its evolution between 1996 and 2003 are analyzed. The results show that the provinces with remarkable advantage in built-up land, including Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong and Guangdong, strengthen their advantage in built-up land to an extent higher than the national average. Meanwhile, the advantage in agriculture land decreases in most of those provinces. The provinces with relative advantage in agriculture land, including Hebei, Fujian, Hainan and Jilin, strengthen their advantage in agriculture land to an extent exceeding Guangxi, Yunnan, Ningxia, Gansu, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Advantage index increases in forestland or grassland in Henan, Anhui, Hunan, Heilongjiang and Sichuan. Those results imply that there are three evolvement mechanisms in the evolution process of land use advantage. They are polarization mechanism, gradient extrapolation mechanism and ecological blocking mechanism. By exploring the results of the existing researches on land use changes in China, it is further confirmed that the three mechanisms, at the national scale, not only dominate the evolution process of regional land use advantages in China, but also dominate the changes of land use pattern in China.