Eastern China, The Three Major Metropolitan Urban System And The Evolutionary Mechanisms

With the development of Chinese economy, the development path of Chinese city becomes the focus of the world. The east, as the highest growth region in China, is the most representative sample catching most attention. Especially the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Delta lead levels in China. The indicators of economic development in the three metropolitan regions have a big share and play a increasingly important role in China. The three metropolian regions in the east is the important growth pole region, the representative region and the main characterization in Chinese urban hierarchy's development and evolution. So it has very important therotical and practical significance to study the mechanism of the three metropolian regions' urban hierarchy's development and evolution. Based on the theories and empirical studies of modern urban system and urban economy, the dissertation studies the mechanism of urban hierarchy's development and evolution in three east metropolitan regions.Firstly, the dissertation analysis the path of Chinese urbanization and the reasons of the difference among east, middle and west region's urban development. The path of Chinese urbanization has its own features, the urbanization stages are quite clear. Due to the strategy of economy development in special national conditions, the level of urbanization is lagging. However, the structure of urbanization size is becoming more rational, metropolitan region and metropolitan zone is come into being and centralize on coastal zone. The spatial structure is in a situation of intensive in the east and distant in the west. Then we compare the east, west and middle region with the regional economy development difference, industry structure, the resident income, the development of the financial industry, opening to the outside world, the factor to the region economy growth, etc. And we conclude that the reason causing the difference, which are geographic area, historic factors, regional price relation, political factors and the private economy.Secondly, the dissertation compares the urban hierarchy of the three metropolitan regions in the east and their economy development. The three metropolitan regions have always an important situation in Chinese economy. With the migrant population centralization, industry agglomeration, the polarization of the economy development is distinct, they now are called growth pole region in Chinese economy development. Yet the three metropolitan regions are still different from each other, when we compare with their total economic output, industry structure, population migration and FDI levels, etc. When studying the driving force of this three metropolitan regions development, we find out that the market mechanism is the motivity, the government impetus is the external power, and the reform and opening up policy, region advantage, resources are aid-drive force, studying.Thirdly, we studies city rank-size law and the factors determining the urban size rise in both china and the east area of three metropolitans. Using the rank-size law, we empirically study China overall cities and the eastern three metropolitan cities respectively, the result is that the Zipf's exponent are both more than 1, which means that the degree of cluster is both very high. In the empirical study of the factors causing the urban size rise, the result shows that there is distinct difference between Chinese overall cities and the eastern three metropolitan cities. Besides the urban population of base period is significantly affect the urban size, the economy factor is the cause of Chinese overall urban size rise, while the nature condition and the policy factor are the cause of those in the eastern three metropolitan cities.Fourthly, the dissertation studies the mechanism of urban hierarchy evolution in the three metropolitan regions. We study the spatial evolution process of urban hierarchy using population and size changes in three metropolitan regions, then discuss the internal mechanism of the formation of three metropolitan regions. Further more, we use the three metropolitan regions' data of 1990-2005 to validate the theory. The result is that the east three metropolitan regions have characteristic but different urban hierarchy evolution path, among which Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei delta is a dual-core urban hierarchy promoting by politics; Yangtze River Delta is a multi-core steady urban hierarchy promoting by market force; Pearl River Delta is an external oriented dual-core urban hierarchy promoting by spontaneous market and policy incident.Finally, the dissertation studies the urban agglomeration economy of east three metropolitan regions. Faced with the different theories in urban development, whether we should focus on the east or the middle and the west; whether the big citiy or the middle and small city, that is important questions. From the aspect of urban agglomeration economy, we have an empirical analysis on the urban agglomeration economy of east three metropolitan regions. And we find that the size of most cities in three metropolitan regions is below the corresponding city size in inverted U curve of optimal urban agglomeration effect, which means the cluster effects of the three metropolitan regions, is not high yet. So there is still great room for urban agglomeration and the east region should keep urbanization.