Evolutionary Pattern and Effect of Administrative Division Adjustment During Urbanization of China: Empirical Analysis on Multiple Scales

The adjustment of administrative divisions is one of the important factors guiding China’s urbanization, which has profound economic and social effects for regional development. In this paper, we comprehensively describe the process of the adjustment of administrative divisions at provincial and municipal levels in China and summarize the effects on the basic structure and patterns of the spatial development. We quantitatively assess the effects on fields such as urbanization and social economy through the use of multidimensional scaling. The results show that: 1) Upgrading county to municipality (or city-governed district) is the main way of adjusting the administrative divisions. It is also an important factor in the spatial differentiation of interprovincial urbanization. China’s population urbanization can be divided into four patterns including interprovincial migration, provincial migration, natural growth, and growth caused by the adjustment of administrative divisions, which is also the main reason for the increased Chinese urbanization rate at the provincial level. 2) Taking the city of Beijing as an example, we generalize five adjustment patterns made to administrative divisions: the set-up of sub-districts, the set-up of regional offices, the upgrading of townships to sub-districts, the upgrading of townships to towns, and the set-up of towns and the addition of new regional offices. We summarize the municipal urban spatial structure, including the sub-district office area in the central urban area, the regional office area in the new urban area, the mixed area of villages, towns, and sub-district offices in the suburb area, and the township area in the outer suburb area. 3) The adjustment of administrative divisions triggers a significant circulative accumulation effect, resulting in the spatial locking of population and industrial agglomeration. It affects the evolution of the urban spatial form and plays an important role in shaping the urban spatial structure to move to the characteristic of multicenter. In general, the adjustment of administrative divisions was an important factor affecting the inflated statistical level of urbanization and also an important driving force for the evolution of Chinese urban spatial organization structure.