ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in detail China's policies regarding industrial development and its consequent spatial patterns. It begins with a review of China's pre-1949 development and then proceeds into the modern period. China's central government and local governments normally establish a socioeconomic development plan every five years, which is called a FiveYear Plan (FYP). China's industrial development reflects its distinctive natural, economic, social, and political characteristics, although it has also absorbed the successful experiences of other industrialized countries. Location strategy was more clearly expressed in the FYP: "In order to change the irrationality of the original unequal spatial distribution, new industrial bases must be set up, but the transformation and extension of old industrial bases and the support of them are prerequisites for building new bases." At the end of the 1970s, great political and economic changes took place in China.
