Identifying China’s leading world city: a network approach

Abstract

This paper reports our research on China's world cities. Formal network analysis of air passenger linkages for recent years among China's most populous cities and among many of the world's largest cities allows us to identify the country's leading world city from among the leading Mainland candidates, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. We theorize our findings about China's world cities in relation to both global forces (and China's increasing entanglement with them) and the policies and actions of the national state. We examine the national and global urban network through a longitudinal, two-level analysis of airline passenger travel for four time points between about 1990 and 2005. We show that Beijing was China's leading world city at the beginning of the time period, a status it lost nationally in as early as 1995, and then globally 10 years later. On the other hand Shanghai became China's leading world city, and it acquired this status first nationally in 2000, and then globally in 2005. The changing status of the Chinese capital corresponds to the country's increasing involvement with the capitalist world economy. Shanghai's ascendance as the leading world city in China may indicate that global forces have come to play an increasingly important role relative to that of the developmental state.

World City Network in China: A Network Analysis of Air Transportation Network

“…The higher degree centrality demonstrates that the actors have more incoming or outgoing ties with other nodes in overall network, which states the advantageous power potential of this node to acquire resources and targeted needs (Ma & Timberlake, 2008). This index is composed of in-degree centrality and out-degree centrality.…”

“…This trend of mutual interactions within two networks is an integral part of urban structure transformation in China, which curtails the urban spatial disparities between core and peripheral cities. Air passengers' traffic flow is the major composition of transportation network; it remarkably configures the premier Chinese world cities integrating in the world cities network, Shanghai and Beijing as the undisputed pre-eminent world cities, their irreplaceable articulations within Chinese urban hierarchy are ideally embodied in the global centripetal forces and national government's policies (Ma & Timberlake, 2008). Apart from the deep analysis of global network of transportation and economy, the world cities network of internet backbone has also attracted some attentions of a bunch of scholars; London and New York are most connected dyad embedded in global information flows of internet (Choi, Barnett, & Chon, 2006).…”

“…By reviewing the major trajectory of world cities research, we can clearly find that the majority of previous empirical study about world city network only concentrates on global scale, only a small number of scholars implement a profound research with regard to insights of East Asia and China (Ben Derudder et al, 2013;Lao et al, 2016;Ma & Timberlake, 2008). In order to rectify this research gap, in this research, we focus on China as the study area, to construct a world city network of Chinese cities based upon the data of Chinese air transportation network.…”

“…Lin (2012) emphasize the aviation network model is best characterized by overcoming the limitations of geographical and spatial constraints; this topological network is simple to explore the spatial mechanism in the complex network in this regard. Most importantly, since Chinese world cities entail the most pronounced capabilities related to the world system, a spatial-temporal air traffic network analysis inferred from world city network trajectory systematically assess the national urban structure of Chinese cities (Ma & Timberlake, 2008). In terms of research, as collections of air transportation data is easier compared to other sources, thus, we utilize these data to conduct a network analysis of China air transportation linkage thereby identifying a world city network of Chinese cities.…”

Spatial hierarchy and emerging typologies inside world city network

“…The first usually uses statistical data on (a) branch network of advances producer service firms (GaWC: Taylor et al, 2010) or (b) divisions of leading multinational corporations (MNC) (Alderson et al, 2010) or (c) international flows, such as passenger air transportation (arguably the most popular approach among others), telecommunication networks, etc. (Ma, Timberlake, 2008;Mahutga et al, 2010). In general, analytical approach and calculation method, suggested by GaWC, became quite popular in a field of global city analysis (GCA) and now to be widely used by other researchers.…”