China''s Urban Economic Region in the Open Context
改革开放条件下的中国城市经济区

Based on the research of city centrality and economic core areas of China and the analysis of foreign trade freight flow, railway passenger flow, railway freight flow, transmigrant flow and letter flow, this paper summarizes the characteristics of domestic and foreign hinterlands of the economic core areas. (1) Beijing-Tianjin Area, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta have become more and more dominant in China's regional economy since the reform and opening up started in 1978. (2) The Central-and-Southern Liaoning Area has been dropped behind by the other three core areas in economic development. The North-East China has degraded from first-class into second-class UERs. (3) As China's economy being gradually integrated into the world, there is a huge steering effect on domestic economic linkages of China's. (4) The distributions of the three core areas' hinterlands in domestic and foreign linkages are different, which reflect their different functional divisions in economic linkages. (5) The foreign economic linkages of Shandong and Fujian provinces almost depend completely on their own foreign ports, including Qingdao, Xiamen and Fuzhou. (6) The foreign economic linkages of frontier provinces bordering foreign countries are playing an important role in their economic development through landway channel.