World Cities Formation in China: A Comparative Study of Five Pre-Eminent Cities

Abstract

The unprecedented economic transformation in contemporary world economy and China society embedded in the globalization circumstances has brought about robust challenging for restructuring its metropolises. The purpose of this paper is aiming to select some pioneering metropolises for examining the extent to which they can be developed as world cites in China and incorporated into the national and global scale. Since there are immense amount of big cities with distinctive functions and hierarchies within China urban territory, in this essay, we conduct the principle component analysis using SPSS for ranking the China big cities based on each city’s salient competitive advantage, thereby detecting the five underlying world cities for comparative analysis. In this case, Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are identified as the pre-eminent world cities in China through some dominant parameters, which encompass the economic, political, infrastructural, urban, social and cultural specifications of the world cities. Through the specific comparative analysis of world cities in China, we can typologically find that Beijing should be considered as the political world city in terms of its tremendous political dominance, whereas Shanghai tends to be deemed as the financial and economic world city with regards to its huge quantity of multinational companies’ (MNCs) regional headquarters and financial firms. As the dominant vanguards of China open door policy, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are best characterized as trading world cities. Taking together with Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Chongqing is simultaneously and actively pertaining to the second tier of world cities in China.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n6p387