The Review of Regional Studies 2008, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 283–287 © Southern Regional Science Association 2010. ISSN 1553-0892 SRSA, 1601 University Avenue, PO Box 6025, Morgantown, West Virginia 26506-6025, USA. Introduction to The Review of Regional Studies’ First Special Issue on Regional Development in China Michael L. Lahr When Robert Gibbs and I took over editorial management of this journal in 2007, we had many lofty goals in mind for The Review of Regional Studies. The main one was to continue the journal’s excellence achieved under the wardship of our immediate predecessors, Dan Rickman and Ronald Moomaw. When prodded, Dan made it clear that a key to their success was the set of special issues that appeared nearly every year of their tenure as managing editors. We concurred. Another of our many goals was to make an explicit effort to broaden the journal’s geographic perspectives. We kicked off this effort by adding a few of our international colleagues to The Review’s Editorial Board. This issue became the second part of our effort. Our idea was that a special issue on China’s regional development would expand The Review’s international appeal. While truly something Robert and I planned for The Review, it is also the product of a chance confluence of events. The first event, of course, was Robert’s invitation for me to join him in editing this journal. The invite by my old grad school chum encouraged me to cordon off a larger share of my time for SRSA concerns. It also enhanced the bundle of incentives that ultimately wound up engaging me in yet another editorial venture. This is critical since such activities appear to yield (for me at least) diminishing returns to scale. The second event was that I met—and was able to work with—Ling Yang. During the preceding year, Ling had applied to work with me, with funding from her national government to be a visiting scholar. She came as a pre-dissertation student with interests in regional income inequality in her home country. Her concern for her country’s socioeconomic conditions explains the geographic theme of this issue. The third and final key event was the convening of the 47 th Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional Science Association in Arlington, Virginia. Had the meeting been much further afield from our offices in New Jersey, I doubt I would have suggested that Ling present a piece we had been working on. Had Ling not agreed to follow my suggestion, I doubt I would have noticed the surprisingly large number of papers at those meetings that focused on regional issues in China. Had there not been so many papers on such issues, I probably would not have proposed to Ling and Robert the concept of a special issue of The Review focusing on regional development in China. The large number of papers presented at the meetings revealed the SRSA’s preference for such material and also identified authors who might wish to contribute to such a special issue. The upshot of this chance confluence of events was that Ling Yang and I ended up scouting out pertinent sessions of the SRSA’s 47 th Annual Meetings. It was there that we met and talked with Jiamin Wang and Seong-Hoon Cho, two of the issue’s authors, about contributing. Jiamin Wang offered up two papers for our consideration. It was a generous offer, but given a limit of about six to seven papers per issue in The Review, Robert and I thought it best to have a diversified authorship for the issue. Of the two, we selected the one entitled China’s Regional Disparity in Demographic Transition: A Spatial Analysis because it made an ideal lead piece. It is performed in a thorough, yet methodologically simple, manner. Wang discusses trends in fertility, the aging of the population, migration, and household composition by region of China, and how they may have affected differential regional economic growth. The piece by