Reviews and prospect of Chinese social geographical studies since 2000

Social geography is an important subdiscipline of human geography, which studies the spatial activity patterns of different social groups, the spatial structures of social activities and their associated processes and explanation. Social geography has a positive guiding significance for us to understand and regulate the development of human society. Chinese social geography started late, and developed with the renaissance of human geography after China's reform and opening up. Nonetheless, under the macro background of economic globalization and China's political-economic reform, China's social and economic transformation has been intensified since 2000, and more social problems and contradictions have appeared. As a result,there are new opportunities for the development of social geography, which has a strong problem-oriented approach. Chinese social geography has developed since 2000, and the research contents, methods and theories have all expanded and improved. In order to describe the current situation of the discipline and direct its future development, we analyze the key literature related to this field. This paper firstly introduces the brief history of social geography, and discusses the research themes of this discipline. Then it uses bibliometric methods to analyze the general characteristics of Chinese social geography since 2000. After that this paper summarizes and reviews the main research concerns of Chinese social geography since 2000 from two main aspects: urban social geography and rural social geography. The last part of the paper, suggests for key areas for future research:(1) To learn from and adapt the achievements of western geography and other disciplines;(2) To expand and deepen existing research contents;(3) To explore and develop a social geography theory with Chinese characteristics;(4) To develop the identification of social problems and improve the capability of solving practical issues. It may be a difficult process, but it is necessary and important to develop Chinese social geography to understand contemporary society better.