The Prospects of International Cities in China

Since 1980's there have been two trends that obviously developed in the would -- economics globalization and urban internationalization. China, with is reform and opening-up policy and rapid economic growth, keeps pace with these two trends. The term "International City" has no putative standard or definition. If we make an analogue of urban functional hierarchy in the world with a pyramid, the International Citiesa are the few elites on its top. The highest level international cities can be called "World City" or "Global City". In today's new international division of labor, they are diversified leading cities with control capacity on a world scale, like New York, London, and Tokyo. The secondary international cities are either diversified cities with influence and regulative functions on multinational scale or specialized cities on politics, economics, culture, or other aspects with worldwide impact. Judged by different criteria, there is no city that is qualified as International City with the exception of Hong Kong, which was returned to the P.R. of China in 1997. Nevertheless, Some favorable conditions for the development of the international city still exist in China. This country is already the sixth largest economic entity in the world, and the second largest economic entity in the world, and the second largest one if GNP estimated by ppp. Furthermore its import and export value make up for 40% of its GNP, indicating that China is repidly merging into global economy. In this 1, 2 billion-population country, the difference of economic levels between urban and rural, coastal and inland regions is so big that a few metropolises in the coastal region have the possibilities and potentials to develop into international cities regardless of rather low GNP per capita of the whole country. This article will focus on analysis from several perspectives, such as the proportion of foreign trade values in GDP, the proportion of imports and exports by foreign funded enterprises in total foreign trade value; distribution of the 500 largest foreign-funded enterprises; distribution of the 500 enterprises with largest import and export values; distrigbution of foreign computer and telecom companies with offices in China; the number of outward flights per week and the international tourists; the value of foreign capital used in cities and so on. From this analysis, it is predicted that Chinese international cities will surely emergy from the eastern coastal regions and they must be the core cities of metropolitan interlocking regions that have been formed or in the process of forming. Those international cities will arise from south to north in turn : Hong Kong-Guangzhu, Shanghai, Beijing-Tianjin, and perhaps the last one is Dalian-Shenyang. The other side of this issue is that there is a long way for the coming international cities in China except Hong Kong. At least China and these core cities must continually devote to (1) improve the regional composition of foreign capital sources. (2) improve the composition of export commodities. (3) improve the investment environment (including hard and soft environment) to attract more transnational corporations to settle. (4) deepen the reform of state-owned enterprises and establish Chinese own transnational corporations to enter the world market.ons to enter the world market.