The spatio-temporal patterns of regional cooperation network: the case of Zhejiang Province, China 2010-2021

Keywords: Regional Cooperation, Spatial Disparity, Network Analysis, Spatiotemporal Pattern, China
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

The formations of city-region have enhanced regional competitiveness but the regionalization of economy has not effectively countered the fierce intercity competition, fragmentation, and regional inequalities. This requires new regional efforts of governments to formulate strategies of cooperation and build regional institutions of intercity cooperation, coordination, and integration, instead of competition. This study focuses on the regional cooperation of cities in Zhejiang Province, China to examine its network structure and spatiotemporal patterns. We have web-crawled 300000 cooperation news data 2010-2021 from government websites to portray regional cooperation network. This fills the gap in previous works that the lack of systematic and quantitative analysis on regional cooperation regarding its patterns, fields and legitimacy.

We conduct social network analysis to calculate centrality degrees of cities, analyze the core-periphery pattern and identify the cohesive subgroups. We find the emerging pattern of “city-helps-city” cooperation. This cooperation is not confined by the geographic distance and primarily driven by the state. Moreover, the cooperation fields are diverse, which goes beyond the traditional economic and industrial cooperation and extends to public service provisions, environmental protection, and spatial planning etc. Last, our analysis suggests that regional cooperation in Zhejiang has been deepened with more emphasis on institutionalized agreements and legitimacy building. This ensures the implementation and effectiveness of cooperation programs. Our study contributes to the understandings on the new norms of regional development. The cooperation perspective enriches the literature of regional governance and provides implications for the balance between enhancing regional competitiveness and resolving spatial disparity.