Understanding the factors that affect residents’ environmental conservation behaviors help in managing the environment of tourist sites. This research provides an integrative understanding of how residents near tourist sites form their environmental conservation behaviors by merging the norm-activation model and cognitive-affective model into one theoretical framework. Results of the structural analysis from a sample of 642 residents showed that this study’s proposed composite model includes a satisfactory level of predictive power for environmental conservation behaviors. The findings identify the following two dimensions of awareness of environmental consequences as having a key role in predicting environmental conservation behaviors: (1) awareness of positive consequences of environmental protection; and (2) awareness of disaster consequences. Results also show that environment attachment and personal norms about environmentalism played a mediating role between awareness of environmental consequences and environmental conservation behaviors, and that personal norms about environmentalism were the most powerful factor in predicting behaviors. Several practical implications were derived from the research findings that can contribute to environment management policy both within and outside the field of tourism, mostly notably: (1) how the effective promotion of these factors can encourage environmental conservation behaviors for residents; and (2) how governments can develop and implement environmental management measures to improve locals’ awareness of positive consequences of environmental protection.

The location selection mechanism and effect of industrial transfer have been widely considered in academia, but the influence of institutional factors on cross-regional industrial transfer and regional differences still need further investigation. Based on theories of economic geography as well as new economic geography (NEG) and its’ institutional transformation, this paper studies the form, mechanism, and effect of the “core–periphery” regional relationship between the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and non-Pearl River Delta (NPRD) areas in Guangdong Province from the micro perspective of industrial spatial organization. Based on a case study on the change of the cross-regional production spatial organization of ceramics enterprises between Foshan and Qingyuan, it is found that after three rounds of spatial reorganization, the production spatial organization of Foshan’s and Qingyuan’s ceramics industries has changed significantly, forming a multifactory, multilocation production spatial structure and regional production network, which further drives to form the regional functional division of “core–periphery”. Institution factors, especially environmental regulation and industrial transfer institutional arrangements, have become an important driving force for the current industrial transfer, but its impact on regional relations is still not a decisive factor. The path locking of the “core–periphery” mode has not been fundamentally broken through. Although the form of spatial inequality has greatly changed, in fact, it produces a new form of inequality. The economic, geographical, and political theoretical framework from the micro-perspective of enterprises will provide a possible theoretical explanation for the phenomenon of “pollution moving to the West, high-tech industry moving to the East, industrial output gathering to the East” in China.

The migration process and patterns of floating populations have received continuing attention from scholars and policymakers. In China, however, studies have been focused on the settlement intention of floating populations based on sampling surveys and yielded inconsistent findings. Drawing upon 18,178,167 authentic individual samples of floating populations in Dongguan city, this study contributes to the literature by examining the effect of individual characteristics on the actual resident actions of floating populations, and revealing both the heterogeneity and continuity of their urban residence among four generations (i.e., during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s). The results show that the proportion of actual resident actions is lower than that reported by previous studies on settlement intentions, and that male, married, middle-aged, more educated, and long-residing members are more likely to choose to stay in Dongguan. Compared to their predecessors, the 1990 cohort reveals significant heterogeneities in their actual settlement choices. The study draws broad implications from the analysis, calling for the equalization of public welfare in Chinese cities and the encouragement of floating populations to sustain long-term residence in the destination cities.

Recent research has focused on a dialectical examination of neoliberalism and China’s inherent authoritarian regulatory regime and the planned economy tradition. In the same vein, this study examines China’s institutional reform and emergent goal-oriented governance since the early 1980s. It argues that China’s four decades of marketization and decentralization reforms are not toward neoliberalism, but have been accompanied by increased authoritarian regulation and state intervention. The reform aimed at complementing rather than dismantling the socialist planned economy through the localization of marketization and the adoption of a “small government” logic. A survey on the revitalization of an old industrial base in Lanzhou detailed the flow of power and its operation under the post-reform regulatory centralism. By delegating the power to formulate planning, the right to intervene in the land market, and the autonomy of policy innovation to the local governments, the central government can achieve precise intervention in local governance and land development, thereby achieving the strategic goal of national accumulation.