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The 2000s has witnessed increasing interests in cities' role of innovation in the era of knowledge-based economy. Compared with substantial empirical analysis on the world city hierarchy of innovation, this paper attempts to examine the national urban hierarchy of innovation capability in China, in terms of ranking systems, spatial pattern and inter-city linkages of knowledge during the post-reform period since the late 1970s. Based on quantitative analysis such as principal component factor analysis and clustering analysis, this paper identifies the five-tier hierarchy of innovation, which is headed by Beijing and Shanghai, followed by the capital cities of each province and regional centre cities. The development of China's urban hierarchy of innovation capability has been driven by such factors as the scale of innovation, scientific scale, innovation potential and innovation environment. The paper further investigates the inter-city linkages of knowledge measured by the number of co-authored papers among the cities. Beijing is positioned in the central position of the knowledge diffusion and knowledge cooperation innovation. More knowledge diffusion among high level cities has occurred than that among the low level cities as well as between the low level cities and high level cities, and provincial capital cities and the regional central cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization and informatization have accelerated city networking process over the world, which makes research on city network a hot topic in the fields of urban geography and economic geography. With Chinese economic structure adjustment and city economic growth, producer services have begun to play an increasingly important role in city-region networking. This paper employs the methodology of world city network to analyze and explain the spatial development characteristics of China's urban network system based on the data of nationwide producer services enterprise network. The research result indicated that the distribution of producer services network has a positive effect on the development of Chinese city networks. City network connectivity is closely related to the significance of city in producer services development, and the former will gradually decline with the drop of the latter. Accordingly, the 64 cities can be divided into the national central cities, regional central cities, sub-regional central cities and local central cities in accordance with their position and role in the nationwide producer services network. It is concluded that high-grade cities with quality producer services dominate the pattern of Chinese city networks and there emerges three spatial agglomerations of producer services enterprises in Changjiang (Yangtze) River Delta, Zhujiang (Pearl) River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan Economical Region. Moreover, the distribution of different producer services industry varies from city to city, which also affects the characteristics of network development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of homeownership status on individual subjective wellbeing indicators in urban China using a large nationally representative dataset. It is the first to gauge the relationship between homeownership and individual subjective wellbeing in the setting of China and is also among the few empirical studies concerning developing countries. The results show that the homeownership status does have a strong positive effect on both one's housing satisfaction and overall happiness in urban China. Even after controlling for housing satisfaction in the equation, the homeownership status still positively affects one's overall happiness, suggesting that the homeownership status might also contribute to other possible aspects of life satisfaction except for housing satisfaction. In addition, in terms of housing satisfaction, females seem to value much more on owning a house than males, while the subjective benefits of owing a house in large cities seem to be much smaller than in small cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses empirical research investigating the connectivity of Chinese cities in the world city network (WCN) in 2010. Topics include an overview of the WCN, which is a regional approach developed by research institute the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) to understand cities in relation to globalization, the role of business services firms in city network formation, and the significance of the uneven integration of Chinese cities in the WCN.

Daily precipitation data from 1951 to 2010 at 33 meteorological stations in five provinces/cities, including Sichuan Province, Yunnan Province, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Guizhou Province and Chongqing City, are used to partition the study area based on precipitation and analyze the spatiotemporal distribution of extreme precipitation. The rotated empirical orthogonal function (REOF) analysis method is used to divide the study area into five parts according to precipitation. The precipitation exhibited greater fluctuations in the last two decades. This finding indicates that extreme precipitation events are increasing. The frequent occurrence of extreme precipitation has made drought and flood disasters more serious. The Mann-Kendall test (M-K test) and moving t test methods are used to analyze the jump and monotonic trends of extreme precipitation indices. It is determined that extreme precipitation indices, including Rx1d, Rx5d, R95p, R99p, CWD and R10 mm, exhibited a weak upward trend during the past 60 years, suggesting that the precipitation amount in the study area decreased slightly, but the maximum daily precipitation amount (Rx1d) and the extremely wet day precipitation (R99p) increased. This finding indicates that precipitation is more concentrated and the extreme precipitation is more serious. The jump for most of the extreme precipitation indices occurred in the 1990s. In terms of spatial scale, extreme precipitation indices, except CDD and CWD, exhibited an increasing trend from the northwest to the southeast. The regions with especially high or low values are easy to identify. Drought risk in northwest Sichuan and the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan is higher. Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and southern part of Yunnan Province have a higher flood risk. The trends of nine extreme precipitation indices also demonstrated the spatial differences. There are more stations exhibiting upward trends than stations showing downward trends for six extreme precipitation indices. The risk of drought/flood may increase in Yunnan and Guangxi, and the storm flood risk in Chongqing exhibited an increasing trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]