Every analysis starts with a base layer
China's authoritative geospatial stack is stronger than most outsiders expect: a national basemap platform free for public use, a standard-map service that settles boundary and projection questions, openly published land-survey bulletins, and a family of scientific data centers distributing gridded resource-environment datasets. Most platforms below are free; registration is usually the only gate. One caution for project work — always record the dataset version and coordinate system (CGCS2000 is the national standard) when you download.
China's official "one map" service: authoritative basemaps, satellite and aerial imagery, place search, and free developer APIs (with key). The natural first stop for anyone building a map of China.
Downloadable standard maps of China and its provinces at multiple scales — the legally vetted versions for publication and teaching. If a map of China appears in your report, it should trace back to here.
The 2021 bulletin of the Third National Land Survey (三调): cultivated land, construction land, and ecological land totals for the whole country. The statistical bedrock of current land-use policy debates.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences data center: gridded population, GDP, land use, vegetation, and climate datasets spanning decades — the workhorse source for regional analysis papers on China.
Open scientific data on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau: glaciers, permafrost, lakes, and ecosystem monitoring. Essential for ecological protection red-line research in western China.
Seventh population census tables, statistical yearbooks, and regional data down to county level. Pair census tables with a GIS layer of administrative boundaries for demographic mapping.
Open, globally consistent population rasters (100 m) that include China — convenient when you need gridded demographics without restructuring census tables yourself.
A searchable catalogue of publicly available geographic information products across agencies — useful for discovering what vector layers and imagery archives officially exist before you request them.
Bulk OSM extracts for China in shapefile/PBF formats. Coverage depth varies by city, but for quick urban-analysis prototypes it beats waiting for licensed vector data.
Data-release interpretation and mapping walkthroughs circulate in the Guoturen news portal, while the Q&A community is where practitioners sort out dataset quirks — coordinate shifts, vintage mismatches, and the like.