Foreign direct investment and the formation of global city-regions in China

Abstract

FDI inflows have redrawn the map of China's geo-economy, reinforcing spatial clustering of economy. Currently, certain Chinese urbanized regions along the Pacific coast, notably the Pearl River Delta region (PRD) in South China, the Yangtze River Delta region (YRD) in Southeast China and the Bohai Rim region (BRR) in North China, have become the agglomerative centres for a variety of the Fordist-style of manufacturing operation. As a strong outward linkage is the major engine of growth in those extended metropolitan regions, they are often labelled as global city-regions. This paper attempts to provide a more comprehensive explanation of the questions about how global city-regions have come into being and what processes have interacted to produce global city-regions in China, focusing on the period shortly before and after China's accession into the WTO. After reviewing the extant theoretical perspectives, this paper attempts to construct the trajectory of Chinese global city-region growth based mainly on empirically derived knowledge on FDI in China with investigation on both external and internal dynamics.