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Chinese Cities in the World-System’s City System: 2001–2014

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Chinese Cities in the 21st Century

Abstract

Cities constitute the geographic nodes grounding the flows of capital, its control, and its deployment across the globe, with some cities achieving more centrality than others in the resulting network of nodes. Since China’s opening up to the world economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century, its key cities have become prominent in this network. This chapter extends previous empirical research situating China’s cities within the hierarchical global system of cities by using formal network analysis to organize data on Fortune 500 headquarter-subsidiary locations annually from 2004 to 2014 across some 6000 cities worldwide, locating relative positions of China’s cities within the global network for each year and identifying changes in their degree of centrality to the global network. Over this time period, more Chinese cities join the world’s most central global cities (relative centrality) and many of them become more central to the network over this time period (absolute centrality).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our analysis is based on Stevens’ (2017) dissertation research, the focus of which was US cities. These data were geocoded in such a way that Hong Kong was broken into districts, the largest of which is Kowloon. At the time of this writing, Stevens was unavailable to reconstitute Hong Kong as a whole in these data. It is noteworthy that Kowloon alone is ranked the 24th most central city in our network analysis for 2014, between Warsaw and Dublin.

  2. 2.

    Derudder et al. (2018) include, in addition to the mainland Chinese cities that are in our analysis, cities in Taiwan of China, and they have complete data for Hong Kong as well.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Michael Timberlake

  2. Domo, Inc, American Fork, UT, USA

    John Orville Stevens

  3. Department of Social and Cultural Studies, Chinese Academy of Governance, Beijing, China

    Xiulian Ma

Authors
  1. Michael Timberlake
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  2. John Orville Stevens
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  3. Xiulian Ma
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Correspondence to Michael Timberlake .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    Youqin Huang

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Timberlake, M., Stevens, J.O., Ma, X. (2020). Chinese Cities in the World-System’s City System: 2001–2014. In: Huang, Y. (eds) Chinese Cities in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34780-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34780-2_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34779-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34780-2

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