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The Aim and Reality of School Geography in China

China was called ‘Central Country’ by the Chinese since they thought China was the centre of the world in ancient times. At the end of the nineteenth century, Western geography was introduced into China by the missions and students who had studied in foreign countries. Since that time, geography has been a required subject in the school curriculum. After 1949, China isolated itself from the outside world. Geography at this time was strongly affected by the USSR. After the Cultural Revolution, China adopted the ‘open door’ policy and people have had the opportunity to open their minds to the outside world again. Geography has been developing as part of this process. In 1993, the geography department in Beijing Normal University, which was set up in 1928, changed its name to The Resources and Environmental Sciences Department. At the same time, most geography departments in other universities changed their name to one relevant to resources, population or environment. This phenomenon reflects the changing understanding and function of geography in the academic world in China. Geography started to be regarded as a subject dealing with the relationships between peoples and environments. Physical geography, which was strongly influenced by the USSR, was supposed to be a part of geography instead of the whole picture of geography. Geographers abandoned descriptive approaches concerned with analysis of the uniqueness of individual regions at the same time, which is quite similar to the ‘conceptual revolution’ in the mid-1970s in Britain and the USA.