On structural properties of transnational urban network based on multinational enterprises network in China: As the case of link with South Korea
基于企业母子联系的中国跨国城市网络结构——以中韩城市之间联系为例

Along with economic globalization and China putting the opening up policy in practice, more and more multinational enterprises entered or went out of China, and established their affiliates, for example, production factories and/or service offices. The multinational enterprises linked Chinese cities with foreign cities by their business network as they carried on their transnational operation. As a result, this transnational urban network was created and developed in China. This paper probed into structural character of transnational urban network of China with South Korea through examining the linkages of headquarters with affiliates of Chinese and South Korean multinational enterprises. The main result of the study can be summarized as follows. First, the urban network developed broadly, including 67 Chinese cities and 67 South Korean cities. Second, the urban network has the property of regional concentration, and network elements such as link bond, linked pair city, network node and node city were mainly concentrated in the Bohai Rim and Changjiang Delta region in China and capital region in South Korea. Third, the linkage density of linked pair city or node city shows the property similar to the rank size distribution, so Qingdao, Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin with Seoul have formed the main linked pair cities, and Qingdao, Tianjin, Shanghai and Beijing formed the main node cities. Fourth, the linkage density of linked pair city or node city has continually been adjusted, but it kept relatively stable as a whole in the range of higher hierarchy. Fifth, some node cities have been specialized and some have been incorporated in type of industry by multinational enterprises, the former as Beijing and Shanghai, the latter as Qingdao and Tianjin. Finally, the link bond has the property of vector, so the network node was divided into two types, one is source node, and the other is receptive node.