Towards more dispersion: the geographical evolution of China's development zones.

The development zone (DZ) is a typical representative of China's regional economic development model. By comparing the development pattern of DZs in China from 2005 to 2017, we find that there was strong imbalance in 2005, but this trend decreased in 2017, mainly due to the rapid increase in the number of DZs in the central and western regions. Moreover, there is a significant correlation between the spatial pattern of the DZs and economic development. But compared with the spatial pattern of economic development, DZs have dispersed more strongly from 2005 to 2017. Indeed, the rapid dispersion of DZs has not fundamentally changed the imbalanced pattern of China's economic development from 2005 to 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]