Study Of The Ranking Of Chinese Urban-system Under The Restructure Of Globalization And Location

The development of Chinese urbanization has been characterized by complexity and uniqueness because of the interaction of the power of globalization and the rapid growth of the economy and urbanization of China. However, recent studies focus mainly on the impact of globalization of Chinese urban-system, but seldom on how local factors influence the development of urban-systems in an urbanized context.We believe that it is difficult to fully understand the Chinese urban-system based on the analysis only from the perspective of globalization and producer industry even in an urbanized context. This is because of the consideration of the integrity and wholeness of space, time and the process of social-economic system. Therefore, in this paper we try to analyze the interaction of impact of globalizational factors and that of local factors in the development of Chinese urban-system. For this purpose, we have found an index that indicates both the impact of globalizational factors and of local factors for the empirical analysis, and analyzed the Chinese urban-system from the perspective of the interaction of globalizational factors of local factors.Therefore, we hypothesize that the development of Chinese urban-system is the outcome of the interaction of globalization factors and local factors, based on relative theories and results of relative studies. We have made empirical tests on this hypothesis using the location of up-scale consumer services in Chinese cities in 2010 and 2012 as main data for analysis. We also use other indices of globalization factors and local factors in our analysis for the relation of possible factors and the location of up-scale consumer services. After that, we have analyzed the ranking of cities in the Chinese urban-system from both local and global perspective using three sub-indices of the location of up-scale consumer services.The results of our analyses are listed as follows. (1) Globalizational factors have significant and primary impacts on the location and changes of up-scale consumer services in Chinese cities, yet the effect of local factors should not be neglect; the location of this kind of services is the result of the interaction of globalizational factors and local factors; These two kinds of factors, without out any of which the location of this kind of services cannot be fully interpreted, are closely related and share parts of explanations for the location of up-scale consumer services. (2) All 76 Chinese cites with relative consumer services can be divided into 4 groups using three sub-indices of the location of up-scale consumer services (market acceptance, priority and congregation); the first group contains two national centres (Beijing and Shanghai); the second group is mainly consisted of sub-provincial cities and cities at low levels in eastern coastal area; the third group is made up of capital cities of provinces; the rest could be divided into two groups, prefecture-level cities in the eastern coastal area, and tourist cities in the middle and west area; this result shows the strong impact of administration factors on the location of up-scale consumer services, and also trends of delayering in the location of consumer services in parts of China.The result of our analysis shows that, as parts of a wholeness of an urban-system, producing activities are inextricably bound up with consuming activities. Local factors, such as local population, administration factors, natural and societal resources and so forth, are still significantly influencing the social-economic development and the structuring of urban-systems even in a globalized and networking age. Consuming activities might be more useful in analyzing a supplementary and local impact of urban-systems in addition to the producer image of urban-systems in a global context.Limited by time and energy, we have looked into only two sectors of up-scale consumer services by using data of two years only. Therefore we should be aware of the limitation of the universality of results and conclusions of this paper. It still needs further studies to check whether the results of this paper could be applied to other sectors of economy.