Exploring The Evolving Characteristics And Influencing Factors Of China’s Port City Size

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up,China’s coastal areas have experienced rapid development in economy and society and the seaport cities have become the important platform of China’s export-oriented economy,making contributions to realizing China’s economy miracle.As the special type of city,the increasing seaport city size benefits from the industrialization and urbanization of the country as well as their special growth factors.Meanwhile,these unique factors play different key roles in different growth stages of the seaport cities.In the comprehensive context of China’s economic transformation,the uncertain trend of trade disputes between China and the United States,and the country’s pursuits of high quality development,based on the analysis of evolving characteristics of China’s seaport cities size over the past 30 years,the paper tried to explore the main factors affecting the growth of China’s seaport cities in different development stages and the key factors affecting the different size of China’s seaport cities in the same development stage.There are two meanings in the study of the growth factors of China’s seaport cities: For one thing,it can provide scientific judgement for the upcoming transformation of China’s seaport cities,that is to say,the future industrial choice and the strategic positioning of the seaport cities.For another thing,it provides new empirical proof for the rationality of theories and models of the port-city relationship,the life cycle of port and port city,urban economic base,and it further deepens the traditional understanding of the port city in the existing research.The paper selects China’s 30 main coastal port cities as the research subject.Firstly,revealing the evolving characteristics of the seaport cities(population and land)size from 1984 to 2017 by using urban expansion index,rank-size rule,and fractal theory.And then divided the above long time into three periods,analysing the main influencing factors of the above seaport cities size evolution in different periods and the influencing factors of different type seaport cities size evolution in the same period by using principle component analysis and the model of STIRPAT,to verify the above research hypothesis:(1)the main factors influencing the evolution of seaport cities size are different in different growth stages;(2)the influencing factors of different type seaport cities size evolution are different in the same growth stage.The paper finds that in terms of the evolution characteristics of port city size,from 1984 to 2017 the total size of 30 China’s seaport cities continuously expanded and the growth rate increased slightly,the size structure of seaport cities changed from small and medium-sized to large and medium-sized,the distribution state of seaport cities changed from equilibrium to disequilibrium.The main influencing factors of seaport city size show obvious stage characteristics,the main factors influencing the evolution of the size of China’s 30 seaport cities from 1984 to 1997 were port and industry activities,from 1998-2007 were the improvement of transport conditions and secondary industry,and from 2008-2017 were the tertiary industry and urban economic strength.In addition,the study also finds that in the last stage transport conditions and tertiary industry are the main influencing factor of size evolution of class I and class II port cities(population is over 3.4 million,land size is over 340km~2)and the port activities,secondary industry as well as transport conditions are the main influencing factor of size evolution of class III and class IV port cities(population is between 0.6 and 3.3 million,land size is between 40 and 340km~2).