Economic Transition and the Evolution of City-Size Distribution of China’s Urban System

Jiejing Wang and Yanguang Chen
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Jiejing Wang: Department of Urban Planning and Management, School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Yanguang Chen: Department of Geography, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 6, 1-15

Abstract: The evolution of city size distribution in China has gained a great deal of scholarly attention. However, little is known about the effect of economic transition on the reorganization of city size distribution in China. Using an urban hierarchy with cascade structure model, we decompose Zipf’s law into two exponential functions that provide a new way of examining the dynamic processes of urban system evolution. This study aims to investigate the dominating latent forces that affect China’s city size distribution through mathematical modeling of the hierarchical scaling laws based on census data of 1982, 1990, 2000, and 2010. A number of features of China’s city size distribution are found. First, the size distribution of Chinese cities displayed a clear trend of evolving toward the Zipf distribution, which is the result of economic transition from planned to market. Second, the rank-size pattern still deviates slightly from the standard Zipf distribution, as indicated by the narrow scaling range and departure of the scaling exponent from the theoretically expected value. We argue that the top-down state regulation is a critical cause of deviation of China’s city size distribution from Zipf’s law.

Keywords: urban system; cascade structure; city size distribution; Zipf’s law; Chinese cities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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