Strategic emerging industries (SEIs) are an important industrial policy to promote innovation, develop advanced manufacturing, and upgrade the economy in China. The research explores the impact of SEIs on urban economic growth in mainland China, from agglomeration externalities and network externalities. The results show that SEIs have a significant impact on growth, and network externalities are generally more important than agglomeration externalities. Although the agglomeration of large‐scale listed enterprises in the city promotes growth, too many large enterprises in the cluster, that is, the lack of small and medium‐sized supporting enterprises, will harm urban growth. Meanwhile, a city with a higher degree of centrality has a larger GDP, but the strength has a negative impact.

Industrial migration is a hot topic in economic geography. This study traces the migratory process of key high-tech enterprises in Beijing during 2008–2016, revealing the migratory characteristics and patterns of high-tech enterprises within the metropolitan area by using spatial analysis methods and mathematical statistics. The results show that: (1) Migrating enterprises are mainly mixed-ownership and foreign-funded or privately-owned enterprises. Medium-sized enterprises are more likely to relocate than small and large enterprises, especially in lucrative sectors. (2) The migration of high-tech enterprises is mainly based on proximity migration. More than 77.19% of enterprises tend to move to agglomerations or agglomeration expansion areas such as Jiuxianqiao and the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (BDA) in Daxing District. In addition, 33 enterprises experience varying degrees of scale expansion after relocation. (3) Most high-tech manufacturing enterprises are in the growth stage of their life cycle. They initially relocate between 7 and 16 years after their establishment, which means that there is roughly a 7-year adaptation or development period for firms within a region after their establishment. During the adaptation period, companies do not tend to relocate; afterwards, as they grow, they need to find other spaces in which to do so. For reasons such as familiarity with the environment, enterprises give priority to finding new locations within the agglomeration and the surrounding area. These results deepen the understanding of the temporal and spatial characteristics of the migration of enterprises within the city from the microscopic perspective and provide a scientific basis for the optimization of industrial space in a metropolis.

Although it is common knowledge that in order to understand how climate may vary in the future we have to study how and why it has varied in the past, meteorological measurements (from which we can assess climatic changes of the past) are only available for a relatively short period (about a century or less) in most of the world and China. To obtain a broader and comprehensive picture of past climatic variations we must rely on additional non-instrumental records, from which climatic condition can be deduced. Such records of climatically sensitive natural phenomena are proxy measures of the past; they contain climatic information which must be extracted from the non-climatic matrix in which it is embedded. By isolating the climatic signal from the extraneous noise, and building up more detailed and geographically extensive records, the possibility of identifying causes and mechanisms of climatic variation is increased and so the prospects of understanding future climatic conditions is enhanced.