
Xiaohui HuNanjing Normal University · School of Geography
Xiaohui Hu
PhD in Economic Geography
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57
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Introduction
I am an economic geographer trained in Germany, worked in Hong Kong and Canada, and currently based in Nanjing, China. I am recently interested in several policy-relevant and theoretically informing themes including new industrial dynamics, economic resilience, sustainability transitions, with a particular focus on their processes, mechanisms and outcomes in the highly heterogenous, dynamic and multi-scalar socio-spatial and sectoral contexts in contemporary China.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
March 2018 - September 2018
September 2016 - September 2021
February 2016 - August 2016
Education
September 2011 - July 2015
Publications
Publications (57)
The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of long-term uneven resilience by critically exploring the notion of adaptation and adaptability. Moving beyond the conventional trade-off assumption, the paper proposes three main types of adaptation-adaptability relationships, namely competing, separated and reciprocal, as an analytical a...
Existing literature on the economic resilience of cities has primarily focused on the study of capabilities and outcomes, while little has been conducted on the evolutionary processes. Drawing upon institutional change and path development concepts, this article develops an analytical framework that explains how different modes of institutional cha...
This paper examines how the economies of old industrial cities in Northeast China respond to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The notion of resistance in regional economic resilience is used to explore what impact factors shape the response to the early stage of the crisis. The analysis reveals significant differences in terms of regional eco...
This article focuses on one of China’s emerging creative clusters – Hangzhou’s mobile game industry – and investigates the various adaptations this cluster has undergone, as well as the mechanisms underlying the industrial and geographical dynamics within the cluster. Specifically, it examines the power asymmetry of governance in the cluster, payin...
The notion of just transition is important and debated in discussions about climate change and low-carbon shifts. This study aims to refocus on just transition from a spatial perspective. We investigate perceptions in Chun'an, Zhejiang, to redefine just transition beyond Western ideas. Our case offers one key yet under-explored dimension in the int...
In the post-crisis era, regional economic resilience studies have progressively formed an ideological system around "evolutionary resilience". In order to capture the emerging dynamics and particularly the perspective turn of regional economic resilience studies, this paper carries out a quantitative analysis of 340 articles included in the scienti...
在“双碳”目标下,推动新社会技术系统是我国构建绿色生产消费模式的重要议题。在交通领域,无人驾驶汽车因其绿色、清洁与智能等特点成为我国“双智”试点对象。文章利用城市转型实验室的视角,分析无人驾驶汽车的技术利基以及社会技术系统,对中国试点城市进行了分析比较。研究结果表明:(1)在理论层面,城市转型实验室作为开放式应用场景,通过政策试验,培育了新技术发展和社会化所需的利基空间,能够对各城市利基发展潜力进行共性挖掘,并能够对不同的城市试点构建进行评价比较。(2)在实证层面,文章对于16个“双智”城市的试点示范效果进行评测,主要影响因素是:城市等级与产业规模、产学研系统完善度、试点示范规模以及消费规模。(3)城市转型实验室的视角——重视利基性、制度性和社会参与性——能够帮助理解我国无人驾驶汽车技术利基...
在当前政治经济多重不确定性的压力语境下,特殊类型地区(如民族地区、资源城市、老工业区和边境地区等)面临巨大挑战。如何提振特殊类型地区经济,如何发展出新的产业路径,是当前区域协调发展战略下的重点研究议题。本文从经济地理学研究视角和范式动态出发,对国内外特殊类型地区新产业路径发展问题进行文献综述。研究显示:①演化经济地理学下的区域结构视角难以充分解释特殊类型地区新产业发展机制,从而迫使研究出现了显著的“能动性视角转向”。然而,这些“基于能动性视角”的研究往往过分注重能动主体的特征、能力和效应,并将特殊类型地区的区域结构属性看成一个“被动的、稳定的”整体,忽视了特殊类型地区存在多元区域结构和动态语境的现实。②在此基础上,相关学者逐步形成了一个共识:即在理解特殊类型地区新产业路径发展动力机制时,结构...
长期以来,区域经济韧性研究根植于欧洲演化经济地理范式,适用于解释冲击语境下区域经济内生适应过程、能力和机制。然而,演化范式缺乏多尺度关联视角,难以解释区域经济韧性的外生性问题。当前,全球地缘政治经济面临重构,全球供应链、产业链和价值链正在重组,嵌入在全球生产网络中的区域难以独善其身,演化韧性的解释力短板凸显。本文结合供应链韧性、产业链韧性和价值链韧性文献,提出了一种“链韧性”视角,辨析了其与演化韧性视角在问题聚焦、研究尺度、影响因素和方法选取等方面的差异,提炼了“链韧性”的视角优势,并构建了“链视角”下区域经济韧性研究的新框架。该框架强调: (1)需分析冲击属性对区域经济韧性的预设作用; (2)针对特定冲击情境,可从结构和能动性因素、区域和外部因素两个维度,来分析区域经济适应的能力、对象、目...
https://link.springer.com/book/9789819992782
Taking the Chinese context seriously, this book provides critical reflections and policy-informed accounts of how and why old industrial cities generate uneven resilience in the face of crisis. It offers unconventional conceptualizations and on-the-ground empirical studies in the Chinese context when it...
Geographical scholarship has advocated the importance of endogenous and place-sensitive development to levelling up left-behind places, by means of reactivating untapped potentials and recuperating a sense of belonging. Drawing on the approaches of global value chain (GVC), and to a lesser extent, global production network (GPN), this paper rethink...
特色小镇是当前中国推进新型城镇化战略的重要政策抓手和落地路径。它强调地方专业化经济和集聚经济的外部性,侧重通过政府支持引导来激发多方主体共同参与,以此构建生产、生活和生态融合的创新创业平台,推动人口城镇化和区域内生发展能力。然而,特色小镇的政策引导和扩散具有显著的“自上而下”性,使得地方实践面临诸多矛盾和问题。文章以浙江省134 个省级特色小镇为研究对象,通过2017—2022 年多次实地访谈、线上问卷和政策文本分析等方法,结合演化经济地理和集聚经济理论,对特色小镇的历史基础、产业属性和发展目标进行识别分析,归纳出具有类型差异的特色小镇,并提出相应政策干预建议。结果显示:浙江省特色小镇可大致分3 类,第一类为政府主导的、面向新产业塑造的科技园区型小镇;第二类为企业主导的、面向传统产业升级的专...
近年来,城市的可持续转型成为推动绿色生产和消费以及构建新社会—技术系统的关键议题。城市转型实验室在此背景下崭露头角,作为促进生产和生活方式绿色化,实现城市低碳转型的重要平台,以及可持续城市发展中的治理方式。文章运用CiteSpace软件,分析Web of Science核心合集中相关文献,揭示城市转型实验室研究动态,探讨其当前的理论和实证问题,以及“双碳”背景下中国城市转型实验室研究的方向。研究结果表明:①城市转型实验室源于转型管理理论,为技术创新提供了跨学科、灵活、综合的平台。②城市转型实验室具备利基、多阶段和共同演化3个视角。③国内城市转型实验室研究仍存在不足,研究视角与国内现实不相符等问题。文章认为城市转型实验室研究涵盖跨领域、侧重技术发展的社会参与性与管理可控性,在如何推动城市转型的...
The aim of this article is to provide a better understanding of long-term uneven resilience by critically exploring the notions of adaptation and adaptability. Moving beyond the conventional trade-off assumption, the article proposes three main types of adaptation–adaptability relationships: Competing, Separated and Reciprocal, as an analytical app...
This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the role of industrial structure in shaping regional economic resilience at different stages with evidence from resource-based cities (RBCs) in China. It decomposes economic resilience into an industrial structure effect and an agency effect and analyzes the impact of industrial structure in ter...
This paper examines how the economies of old industrial cities in Northeast China respond to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The notion of resistance in regional economic resilience is used to explore what impact factors shape the response to the early stage of the crisis. The analysis reveals significant differences in terms of regional eco...
Existing literature on the economic resilience of cities has primarily focused on the study of capabilities and outcomes, while little has been conducted on the evolutionary processes. Drawing upon institutional change and path development concepts, this article develops an analytical framework that explains how different modes of institutional cha...
The introductory chapter starts with a background of recent conceptual discourses and concerns on regional economic resilience under an increasingly uncertain and post-crisis context in economic geography (from here on EG). Within this background, two general research gaps are identified that motivate me to fill the gaps by setting main aims and ra...
In recent years, regional resilience has become a fashion mainly used to understand how regional economies recover after ‘sudden’ shocks. However, little attention has been paid to how regions adapt to a ‘slow-burn’ crisis in a long-term perspective, and why they adapt differently. Moreover, the notion of resilience has suffered from conceptual fuz...
In this book, a more advanced conceptual framework with multiple perspectives on analyzing and understanding uneven economic resilience of OICs has been developed with three dimensions: First, it is built upon an in-depth conceptualization that de-constructs the dualism idea between adaptation and adaptability. Second, this book highlights adopting...
The economic resilience of old industrial areas has been receiving much attention in economic geography and regional development both in industrialized and emerging economies. Although ample Chinese-speaking studies have been published on the topic, most of them suffer from paying too little attention to dynamic multi-scalar interactions between fi...
近年来,“可持续转型”进入经济地理学研究视野,成为探索绿色技术发展动力、理解区域产业演化机制的新范式,形成了“转型地理”这一新兴脉络。然而,当前转型地理研究侧重“概念和分析框架单纯借用”的实证分析,缺乏多元视角融合,使其处于转型研究边缘位置,不利于学科自身发展。本文将转型研究中的多层次视角和技术创新系统同地理学视角下的语境敏感性、空间嵌入性和地方能动性概念相结合,构建了一套既能对接主流转型思想,又能反映经济地理学科学问题的新分析框架。该框架强调:① 区域可持续转型是一个语境-结构-能动性在多地理尺度上因果互动的演进过程;② 转型地理性主要体现在新社会-技术系统嵌入旧体制社
会空间的程度、能力、方式、过程和结果差异上;③ 转型对象是具体的,也是落地的,离不开地方能动性对旧社会-技术系统要素重组...
1) 不同维度下区域经 济韧性存在差异性与复杂性, GDP 维度抵抗力较高, 低抵抗力区域集中在中部和东北地区; 进出 口维度抵抗力最低, 边疆地区进出口抵抗力更低; 消费维度抵抗力较低, 长期来看, 东部地区消费 抵抗力较高。 (2) 产业结构属性对区域经济韧性影响显著。从较长时段看, 高专业化对韧性有显 著促进作用; 相关多样化在疫情发生一段时间后对韧性起积极促进作用, 非相关多样化长期对区 域经济韧性起消极作用。 (3) 政府调控能力对韧性有显著促进作用, 对外依赖有利于区域经济积 极应对疫情冲击。 关键词: 新冠疫情; 区域经济韧性; 时空格局; 影响因素; 中国 0 引言 2019 年末发生的新冠肺炎 (COVID-19) 疫情对包括中国在内的世界各国经济均产生了 巨大冲击 [1,...
The actions of platforms and their all-inclusive impact on place development is coined platform-based place making in this article. We use the actor-network theory to analyse a typical e-commerce platform-based place making, namely the emergence, development and upgrading of Taobao villages in China, and to explore the mechanisms of platform place...
China’s national strategy of ecological civilisation is a response to the climate emergency facing the world today. Integrated into China’s core national agenda in 2018, ecological civilisation refers to establishing sustainable production and consumption patterns, to achieve human–human, human– nature and nature– society harmony, emphasising the i...
Through a case study of Kunshan, China, this paper shows how a local state utilised place-based leadership to enhance regional economic resilience under the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It unpacks how Kunshan effectively mitigated early economic disturbances induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, by two ways of leadership actions, namely, enacting jurisdic...
This paper, through a case study of the Gengche Township in north Jiangsu (Subei), unveils how a less-favored region breaks out of the old industry path of waste recycling and processing and embarks on a green new one specializing in E-commerce. Drawing on key concepts in evolutionary economic geography, we propose a conceptual framework that addre...
The notion of resilience has been increasingly adopted in economic geography, concerning how regions resist and recover from all kinds of shocks. Most of the literature on the resilience of coastal areas focuses on biophysical stressors, such as climate change and some environmental factors. In this research, we analyze the regional economic resili...
The notion of “Just Transition” (JT) is gaining purchase in both academic and policy discourses related to climate change and low-carbon transitions. Despite its growing popularity, the very meanings of JT have somehow been lost in a wide spectrum of principles, aims, and visions attached to this concept. The purpose of this project is to examine t...
Recently, a new state-led platform of regional development in China, known as specialty towns, has been launched and rolled out nationwide. Despite the greater emphasis on place-based industry specialism and agglomeration, the new strategy suffers from a typical top-down governance approach that has confronted emerging problems. In this paper by us...
近年来,可持续性转型概念进入经济地理学者视野,用于探究区域绿色技术、消费市场和
产业转型的多维因果过程与空间动力机制,已成为演化经济地理学和环境经济地理学新兴议
题之一。为掌握该研究动态,本文对2000—2020 年来共计2453 篇可持续性转型文献进行回
顾,重点探讨了转型地理研究进展和理论不足,阐述了经济地理学对可持续性转型研究的理论
价值和融入方向。本文发现:① 可持续性转型是创新研究和可持续管理领域热门议题,呈多学科介入特点;其中,转型地理研究正不断崛起,并聚焦区域绿色新兴产业发展的社会-技术共演过程、多尺度动力机制、环境经济和社会效应及其转型地理性等问题。② 经济地理学对转型研究有三个视角优势:时空语境敏感性;转型过程、机制和结果的空间多样性;新产业系统的地方嵌入及其合法化的地理性...
In the contexts of on-going global political-economic shifting and shocks of multi-scalar crises, regional economic resilience has become one of the key themes in economic geography for exploring regional development dynamics. Regional economic resilience is not only about local economic configurations and adaptability, but also related to extra- r...
The local buzz-global pipeline model in economic geography addresses how local firms - through a long-run and multi-scalar buzz and learning process- form key knowledge pipelines benefiting for internationalization and upgrading. However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who lack global experiences and capabilities face more risks to build...
This paper provides a critique of the “specialty towns” program, a key constituent of China’s current new-style urbanization campaign. It problematizes the contradictory accounts of the program, namely, emphasizing “place-based” strengths while simultaneously standardizing forms, functions, and goals with a strong “place-neutral” approach. We argue...
可持续性转型是近20 年 欧洲学界的新兴研究领域,它关注既有社会技术系统向更加可持续的生产与消费模式的根本性转变,对不少国家和地区的绿色转型政策实践已经产生了重要的影响。近年来,越来越多学者开始关注可持续性转型与经济地理的交叉融合,可持续性转型地理逐渐发展成为一个新兴的研究议题,着重从空间根植性与多尺度交互2 个维度回答“可持续性转型在哪里发生”的问题。论文在简要总结可持续转型理论与分析框架的基础上,系统回顾和评述了转型地理研究进展与不足,并着重从中国的情境提出未来该议题的几个重点方向:① 基于中国语境下的的转型地理概念化和理论框架构建;② 后发地区可持续性转型与绿色产业追赶;③ 城市可持续性转型差异与联系;④ 多尺度交互下转型主体能动性与权力博弈;⑤ 人工智能等新兴技术对可持续转型的影响。
In recent years, China has been increasingly witnessed as a major global outward investor, especially since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. The question of whether and if yes how the BRI reshapes firm outward investment motives remains under-researched. Using a project-level database of China's Outward Direct Investment fr...
China's specialized markets as a special form of bottom-up capital agglomeration have played a key role in fostering regional development. It once exhibited positive externali-ties with high efficiencies. However, given the rapid proliferation of specialized markets and the penetration of E-commerce, their advantages may have shifted and the unders...
老工业区重构是经济地理学的重要研究议题。在全球化步伐放缓和全球制造业下行的宏观背景下,老工业区已愈来愈成为各国发展战略制定的核心对象。对近十年有关老工业区重构的中外文献进行细致梳理,指出了当下研究存在范式应用多元化的趋势,但这些范式在概念使用、尺度聚焦、时空侧重和机制解释上存在显著差异,缺乏相互融合和优势互补,面临现实应用瓶颈。特别是,长期用于解释老工业区重构的演化经济地理学,因其忽视多尺度-多主体-多分析单元的能动性作用而难以有效解释重构过程、机制、结果及其背后的地理性。本文将转型研究中的多层次视角同演化范式相结合,提供了一种具备上下因果辩证解释力的多尺度分析框架,能有效解释老工业区重构问题。在此基础上,探讨了未来研究方向。
In recent years, regional resilience has become a fashion mainly used to understand how regional economies recover after ‘sudden’ shocks. However, little attention has been paid to how regions adapt to a ‘slow-burn’ crisis in a long-term perspective, and why they adapt differently. Moreover, the notion of resilience has suffered from conceptual fuz...
Sister city relations (SCRs) represent a significant but less well researched type of inter-city (regional) networks. While most analyses of the connectivity of Chinese cities focus on economic linkages such as air traffic flows and corporate connections, limited attention has been paid to SCRs, as an emerging mediator in affecting global inter-cit...
Sister city relations (SCRs) represent a significant but less well researched type of inter-city (regional) networks. While most analyses of the connectivity of Chinese cities focus on economic linkages such as air traffic flows and corporate connections, limited attention has been paid to SCRs, as an emerging mediator in affecting global inter-cit...
The shift of manufacturing industry from Japan, the first industrializing nation in East Asia, to neighboring South Korea and China saw the emergence of restructuring problems and policies in traditional industries and regional economies depending on them. Based on a literature review on this topic in East Asia, this paper draws three conclusions....
Fuxin is a resource-based prefecture-level city of Liaoning province in Northeast China. Despite its remote location, short urban history and sparse population, the city was positioned as a nationwide role model of socialist economy by the central state in the Maoist era. However, the city economy quickly turned into decline in the wake of market r...
The restructuring of old industrial areas has been receiving much attention in regional development studies both in industrialized and emerging economies. Although ample Chinese-speaking studies have been published on the topic, most of them suffer from paying too little attention to dynamic multi-scalar interactions between firms, institutions, po...
This paper examines the path-creation mechanism of the coal-chemical industry and its relations to the old path of the coal mining industry in an old industrial region of China. It reveals that the rise of the new path benefits from the old path to a limited extent. The strong multi-scalar structured path dependence upon the coal industry fundament...
Abstract: Although the role of the local state in China's regional development has been regarded as important, individual local state actors and their relation with institutional change have been under-explored. Critically exploring the Western idea of place leadership, this paper launches the notion of local state leadership as a specific Chinese...
Although regional resilience has come into fashion to understand how regional economies recover after shocks, it has suffered from dualistic thinking, which undermines its explanatory power. This article addresses this problem by developing a conceptual framework of uneven resilience of regions in a long-term perspective, on the basis of a comparat...
My dissertation is concerned with uneven economic adaptation and adaptability of old industrial areas in an evolutionary and institutional, as well as a human agency perspective. There is a considerable literature in economic geography (EG), focusing on the role of firms and industry dynamics in affecting the evolution of old industrial areas (OIAs...
The spatially uneven adaptation and adaptability of old industrial areas has become one of the most intriguing issues in the field of economic geography in the post-‐crisis era. This chapter contributes to a conceptual inspiration by synthesizing multi-‐dimensioned impact factors and their characteristics on the adaptability of old industrial are...
The role of state agencies in regional new path creation has been largely neglected and underexplored to date. This article aims to contribute to these debates by a case study of the wind power industry from China’s rustbelt, where local economies have been strongly influenced by the state. It demonstrates how a new growth industry was created over...
Science and technology parks have been popular among policy-makers at several spatial levels to promote innovation and economic growth of certain localities. However, this mainly property-led policy tool has been criticised for two reasons. First, it often failed to successfully support regional networking and technology transfer to regional firms....
Gravity model has been introduced in several spatial interaction studies, especially in trade relationship, migration and transport activities on different geographic levels. But there is still little research focus on inter-city spatial linkage of innovation activities in a certain region. Within this context, we are seeking to gain a new perspect...