This dataset contains a record for every county-level unit and urban ward (qu) in China as of 1990, coded in offical Guobiao codes as of the standard census date, 1 July 1990. ChinaA is organized so that four different datafiles can be selected for particular analyses. The MQ (Merged Qu) File has combined selected urban qu in order to create units large enough to be mapped at the 1:1 million scale used in the project's companion GIS files. These mergers have been designed so that the central city of a given municipality is always intact in a single merged unit. The MQ File also incorporates a few non-municipal mergers designed to minimize the number of cases where a single unit in the tabular file corresponds to two or more polygons in the companion GIS file. As of this (September 1995) writing, CITAS is providing a digital basemap only for the MQ File. The Unit-control section contains more information about the alternate FD, MC, and RS files. Variable designations are all preceded by the letter 'a' (for "area"), indicating the ChinaA dataset, which is to be distinguished from the ChinaT (for "town"), the central-place dataset with records for individual cities and towns. The variable numbering scheme is explained in Variable designations. ChinaA is a single dataset but in order to make the browsing of its contents more convenient, the documentation has been broken into sub-sections below. Users may also refer to Professor Skinner's original codebook entitled ChinaA Dataset. The data have been geocoded to match county boundary coverages for mid-year 1990. For units without data, a set of special missing data codes have been used.
Unit-control variables
1990 Census variables
Agricultural economics variables
The tabular datafiles are available in two formats, dBase and Arc/Info export file.
chinaad1.dbf, chinaad1.e00 Census - Population variables a110 to a370 chinaae1.dbf, chinaae1.e00 Census - Employment and Ethnicity variables a381 to a454 and a701 to a874 chinaag1.dbf, chinaag1.dbf Agricultural variables a601 to a624
Last modified on 12 May, 1997 | Return to CITAS Homepage |