Rapid urbanization and climate change are rapidly changing earth and the earth systems. This paper explores the new tasks and new frontiers of Chinese geography from the perspective of the Anthropocene. As a crucial discipline within earth sciences, geography spans the natural and social sciences and is poised to become the most promising field in the era of Anthropocene. It is a new mission of geography to define the spatiotemporal structure of anthroposphere, rebuild the framework of the human-environment relationships, conduct research on topology of the human geography, return to research on sustainable development based on the unified geography. Human geography, as the most important branch of geography, will be reshaped for rapid world urbanization, climate change and sustainable issues. For historical geography, it needs to pay greater attention to the impact of human activities, such as the history of prehistoric marine civilization and continental civilization, as well as the history of the modern environmental pollution. For economic geography, it could be on finance-trade-globalization, global value chains-global production chains-global industrial chains, of course the "global South"will be becoming a hot spot and of focus. Due to the collectivization of western countries centered on the United States, the trend of deglobalization and the increasing risk of the new cold war, political geography is in urgent development need. It could be shifting from geopolitics to global governance, rebuilt an effective global institution for cooperation that belong fields of unconventional and new energy technologies. For social geography, it would prioritize social issues on the global perspective, especially as rapid world urbanization and global climate change have inequalities of race, gender, class and some other social groups. Information technology and the Internet have given Cultural Geography new connotations and new opportunities for development. It is necessary to pay special attention to the significance of human beings' use of various words and semiotics tools to the planet and its place where human being live, and explore more effective countermeasures to intervene in rapid earth change. In response to the accelerated processes of urbanization, climate and earth changes, Urban Geography should swiftly transition from a traditional framework focused on "urbanization-urban systems-internal urban structures" to a new framework focusing on modernization based on green growth. It is very likely that Anthropocene geography will give geographers some new disciplines to develop imaginary fields, such as deep sea and deep space exploration, planetary geography, interstellar colonization and migration.

Basic hypothesis is the logical starting point for any disciplines; however, the regional school believes that basic hypothesis is not needed because geography is more concerned with the exploration of regional individuality and the analysis of regional differences. Obviously, this view, while addressing the application of geography and meeting the need for problem-oriented researches, but differs from the general definition of science. The basic hypothesis of the spatial school is homogeneous space (plain), according to which a corresponding theoretical system is constructed, which is more in line with the general scientific definition. Although scholars have previously pointed out the defect that the views the spatial school holds were too abstract, then they fell into a socialized and microscopic path of development, which apparently does not solve the problem of the path of development of the spatial school or even the discipline of human geography. This paper argues that the spatial school, starting from the basic hypothesis of homogeneous space, does not answer the locational question (from a geographic perspective) of the generation of (the first) city, although it solves the question of the mechanism of the generation of (the first) city (from an economic perspective) through the spatial polarization effect. For this reason, the basic hypothesis of human geography needs to be redefined, i.e., homogeneous spaces need to be replaced with homogeneous regions. The latter differs from the former in that there is a clear boundary range, thus homogeneous regions have locational value function attribute, regional scale attribute, regional open state attribute, etc. Thus, reconstructing the basic hypothesis not only addresses the existing inherent deficiencies of the spatial school (it is so abstract as to be divorced from geography), also supplements the basic hypothesis for the existing regional school (which is less restricted to basic assumptions and more focused on application). On this basis, this paper integrates the combined effects of spatial polarization effect, distance attenuation effect, regional edge effect and allometric growth effect, to construct a regional spatial structure theory system, which is composed of point elements, linear elements and area elements. Besides, point structure theory, axis structure theory and area structure theory are also integrated in the regional spatial structure theory this paper conducts.

Data is one of the most crucial issues in achieving sustainable development in rural areas. Hitherto, emerging techniques, like remote sensing and machine learning, provide a promising foundation aiming at the data acquisition, calculation, and analysis, especially for vast, scattered, and full of territory heterogeneity villages. Specifically, the methodology of the Computable Village establishes the imagery-figure relationship via deriving systematically the multi-sourced data of rural natural and human settlement subjects; besides describing various rural elements quantificationally levering index calculating, data mining, and Artificial Intelligence methods, which could further unveil the spatial discrepancy and dynamic tendency of rural development in the total territory, and thus provides a possibility for rural researches striding from local to global. In this paper, a technical framework of the Computable Village is proposed including: (1) the categories and features of multi-sourced rural data such as remote sensing; (2) the computing approaches for rural data and the intelligent interpretation techniques for imagery-figure relationship; (3) the supports from the computed results to rural sustainable developments. Finally, the current challenges as well the further research directions are discussed and envisaged aiming at the Computable Village.