Spatio-temporal Evolution of Association Pattern of China s International Friendship Cities
This paper uses social network analysis and Herfindahl-Hirschman index to analyze the spatio-temporal evolution of association pattern of China's friendship cities from 1973 to 2022,and uses scale politics to reveal its evolutionary mechanism.The findings are as follows.① Chinese cities as a whole show a trend of spreading from East China,Northeast China and North China to South China,Southwest China and Northwest China,showing a spatial distribution pattern of more in the east and less in the west.Foreign cities show a trend of spreading from East Asia and North America to Western Europe,Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.② The association pattern of China's international friendship cities tends to be complicated,the first pairing re-gion of each region has changed greatly in different periods,and the range of pairing continues to expand.On the whole,there are a large number of pairs between China and Western Europe,East Asia(Japan and South Korea)and North America,but the phenomenon of close pairing between the border provinces and their neighboring cities in foreign countries is more significant.At present,China's international friendship cities are clustered along the"Belt and Road".③ From the perspective of the influ-ence mechanism,the actors in the global,national,local and other scale have shaped the association pattern of China's interna-tional friendship cities through the scale reconstruction processes such as scaling up and scaling down.Among them,the eco-nomic development level at local scale(city),social and cultural relations,urban industrial structure,geographical proximity,historical communication and correlation,urban functions as supporting factors affect the processes of scale reconstruction.The scale reconstruction processes promote the evolution of the spatial distribution pattern of Chinese and foreign cities and their pairing relations,and further lead to the evolution of association pattern of China's international friendship cities.
city diplomacyinternational friendship citiesassociation patternscale politicsevolution mechanism