Fan Jie
Since 1981, Territorial Planning (TP) has been developed on a large scale in China, not only in the range of the whole country, but also in the range of multi-provinces and a province, as well as in a prefecture and urban region. This work affords a very important field for economic geographers to take part in the practice and brings about a great advance in (he research of economia geogrephy. With the development of reform of the economic planning and management system, it is necessary to regulate the principle and component part of TP.Based on an approach to the problems, which are present in the process of formulation and implement of TP in China, it is considered, that the function of TP should be changed to oganization of spatial structure, particularly to strategical distribution of social and economical development over a long period of time (normally more than 20 years) in planning area. So the planning system of Ciiina will consist of two series, development planning from point of view of time and distribution planning from space including TP, regional planning and urban planning, etc.. To regard the demand of characteristics, TP should not be worked out in the range of a prefecture or even smaller area such as a city and a county, but in the whole country, multi provinces, province and multiprefecture (generally more than two prefectures) The contents related to resources and environment will be regarded as the principal part of planning. In addition, the relationship among different ranges of area, between space and time planning seriese are discussed. (As the practical base in writing this paper, the author has taken part in the work of TP of Jiao-Zuo Economic Region in province Henan, Prefecture Chang-Zhi in Province Shanxi, Prefecture Tai-An in Province Shandong, and Province Liaoning from 1983 to 1990.)