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

Abstract

World city network formation is one of the most robust trends in the context of globalization. The unprecedented economic transformation and infrastructure restructuring enable China to integrate in world city network overwhelmingly. The purpose of this paper is aiming to conduct a network analysis of Chinese air transportation network based upon large-scale collected data of inter-city air passengers' volume thereby identifying the world city network of Chinese cities, as well as the internal cooperative relationship and hierarchical structure of these articulations in the network. There are 80 sample cities are enclosed in this air transportation network model using UCINET, which is pioneering social network analytical software. Clearly, UCINET is applied to manipulate the matrix of inter-city air passengers flows in order to elaborate analyze of density of the whole network, to calculate multiple centrality of each node cities, which strives to identify the dominance of each cities' hierarchical power and positions. In addition, NetDraw program in UCINET is designed to visualize the whole network whereas CONCOR program is operationalized to classify major subgroups within national air transportation network of China. Based on the analysis, we can find that Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou play a dominant role in this network, and it is evident that there exist some robust cooperative relationships within and between subgroups arisen from overall air transportation network. Overall, these findings consolidate a concrete cornerstone of Chinese world city network formation.

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

“…In this era of transnational circumstances, world cities interfaced with globalization trend has become one of the notable themes for research. Many scholars contribute to this fascinating area; they tend to engage in the investigation of world city network, especially interlocking nodes connection of advanced producer service firms of world cities (Beaverstock, Smith, & Taylor, 1999;Derudder, Taylor, Witlox, & Catalano, 2003;Taylor, Catalano, & Walker, 2002) , and global space of air passengers traffic (Derudder & Witlox, 2005;Mahutga, Ma, Smith, & Timberlake, 2010;Smith & Timberlake, 2001;Li, Z., & Dawood, S. R. S., 2016). On the other hand, some other researchers penetrate into another stream of world cities, notably in hierarchical specification and territorial attributes analysis (Brenner, 1998;Ng & Hills, 2003;Robinson, 2011).…”