Theory of Global City and Establishment of Chinese Global City

The paper reviews global city theory with some comments and examines the establishment of Chinese global city.First,the paper traces the history and analyses the paradigm of global city theory: Peter Hall is regarded as early pioneer of modern study of global city,the world city hypothesis created by John Friedmann is of great significance in the study of global city theory,Sassen has established a new view by case study of great city in the world,such as London,New York,Tokyo.The study of global city has turned to the paradigm of interaction of local and globalization from Maxims of political economics.Second,the paper reviews the main division patterns of world city system and gives some comments.World city hypothesis give a skeleton of world city,but lack the case study.Sassen failed to gave the division pattern of world city,but with her ideas of producer service as an important dynamics,Taylor and Walker give their division pattern of world city from the view of producer service,though their disadvantage were not located each city in the network of world city.Equipped with the information as the global force,Finnie worked out the division pattern of world city from World Telecom and information,but this may only showed the position of cities in the world of Telecom and information.Smith and Timberlake tried to identify the world city in the economic networks of cities in the world,but they just used the air passage to survey the connection of cites,the result may just reflected the city importance in the airline.Abrahamson established the world city pattern using the synthesized index of culture and economy,which may more show the nature of world city system.Nowadays,world city system studies have tended to use synthesized indexes of culture and economy instead of single one,however,it confronted many difficulties,such as,how to choice indexes to accurately present the nature of world city,how to survey some indexes such as the information and culture,how to evaluate the weight of each index,how to get more data and materials among the cities in the world,all of questions require to be solved in the later study of world city and also show some tendency of study of world city.Lastly,based on retrospect and comments of world city theory,the paper has some suggestions on the establishment of Chinese international or global city.With the development of Chinese economy,entry of WTO,China have speeded up its international urbanization,especially coastal area,government has great passion to establish the global city.It possible to build up the global city in the nesr future in China,but,Chinese global city establishment should rely on Chinese reality,and abide by the law of world city hierarchy,and steadily promote the establishment of global city,so as to display more roles in the world city networks.