Around both the problem of "Pushing on the urbanization of China" and the problem of "Reforming the system of the division of administrative areas of China", there are plenty of researches on the two big proportions, during the recent 20 years in China, which have been paid a great deal of attention both by the theoretical fields and by the fields of the practice. Although there are many achievements in the above researches, still, some theoretical problems need to be discussed. And in fact, the two problems, i.e., urban development and evolution of administrative areas, are onlyclosely related. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on two main domains--one ison studying some fundamental theoretical problems both on the city and on the administrative areas, and one is putting forward some suggestions on the urbanization and on the reform of the system of the division of administrative areas of contemporary China, by the means of historical and comparative study and a case study of Zhejiang province. First, the author discusses the concept of the city and the urbanization. It is thought that, the essential nature of a city is that it is the place on which some public powers accumulate in a region; and just as the public powers accumulating on the place, that other elements, such as population, buildings, facilities, activities and information, etc., are drawn and concentrated on it. The city, from its inner meaning of system, is just a place, a settlement of public powers-accumulation, with formal state institutions and government organizations. And the concept of urbanization,meaning literally "changing a rural place into a town-like area", similarly, should bedivided into two levels of distinct meanings--one means urbanization ofadministrative, legal system, and one means urbanization of landscape. And, of course, the former is the key and the crux, which determines the direction and the process of the urbanization of landscape. From the angle of urbanization of administrative andlegal system, the road of urbanization can be summarized as two kinds--one is theroad on which the state power swallows the city power (civil rights), and the other is the road on which there exists a dividing line between the state power and the city power, which respectively were adopted by ancient China and western Medieval Europe, typically, and never mixed together. And on the basis of the above analysis, the author advances a new theory on the city's history and summarizes it as "ThreeCity Revolutions" and "Three Urbanization Waves"--the First City Revolution isthe settlement dividing into the city and the countryside (i.e. the city emergence), which took place in the several countries with an ancient civilization both in the East and in the West; the Second City Revolution is the Medieval City Revolution, namely, the emergence of the Medieval autonomous city, which only took place in the Western Europe; and the Third City Revolution is the transformation from the "state city " to "world city "(i.e. the global city emergence).Secondly, the author discusses the concept of the division of administrative areas. It is thought that the division of administrative areas is just the place's distribution of public powers (esp. the state powers) in essence, and it can be given a definition as the process of dividing the state public powers and the situation of distributing in space. , Then, the author discusses the types, the administrative levels and the origin, theevolution of the division of administrative areas, and sums up the main three modelsof the division of administrative areas in nowadays world--the Anglo-AmericanModel, the French-German Model, and the Former Soviet Model. And also, on the basis of the above analysis, the author expounds the interactive relationship between the urban development and evolution of administrative areas, which can be manifested on the common origin of city and administrative areas, and on the same-construction or the difference-construction space syst... |