Redefining Chinese city system with emerging new data

•Redefine Chinese city system with road junctions using percolation theory.•Evaluate the redefined city system in terms of its size, pattern, scaling, hierarchy and temporal evolution.•Understand the evolution of the Chinese city system during 2009-2014.•Benchmark the results with the conventional Chinese city system by using yearbooks.

Modern Chinese cities are defined from the administrative view and classified into several administrative categories, which makes it inconsistent between Chinese cities and their counterparts in western countries. Without easy access to fine-scale data, researchers have to rely heavily on statistical and aggregated indicators available in officially released yearbooks, to understand Chinese city system. Not to mention the data quality of yearbooks, it is problematic that a large number of towns or downtown areas of counties are not addressed in yearbooks. To address this issue, as a following study of Long et al. (2016), we have redefined the Chinese city system, using percolation theory in the light of newly emerging big/open data. In this paper, we propose our alternative definition of a city with road/street junctions, and present the methodology for extracting city system for the whole country with national wide road junctions. A city is defined as “a spatial cluster with a minimum of 100 road/street junctions within a 300 m distance threshold”. Totally we identify 4629 redefined cities with a total urban area of 64,144 km2 for the whole China. We observe total city number increases from 2273 in 2009 to 4629 in 2014. We find that expanded urban area during 2009 and 2014, comparing with urban areas in 2009 are associated with 73.3% road junction density, 25.3% POI density and 5.5% online comment density. In addition, we benchmark our results with the conventional Chinese city system by using yearbooks.

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