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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Affairs and Policy
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1506903
This article is part of the Research Topic Challenges and Solutions in Forecasting and Decision-Making in Marine Economy and Management View all 14 articles

Research on the Positioning and Enhancement Path of Marine Cities in China's Internal Circulation Network

Provisionally accepted
Junkai Sun Junkai Sun 1Xinyue Gao Xinyue Gao 1*Xindan Zhang Xindan Zhang 2
  • 1 Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China
  • 2 Dalian Nationalities University, Dalian, Liaoning Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    China's marine cities have reached a critical juncture after 40 years of rapid development. In this new stage, where internal circulation is the main focus, there is a need to enhance the internal circulation capabilities of these cities and unleash their full economic potential. Based on data from 284 prefecture-level cities in China, this paper constructs the social network of China's urban internal circulation with the help of the modified gravity model, and explores the conditional configuration of the improvement of the status of marine cities in internal circulation network by using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method. The key findings include: (1) The development level of marine cities' internal circulation can be categorized into three tiers, led by Shanghai. The development gap between the 14 marine cities has gradually widened over recent years. (2) Chinese marine cities can be divided into three groups in the topological structure of China's urban internal circulation network: core, periphery, and edge, with Shanghai being the core "bridge" in the network. The traditional advantages of some northern economically strong cities in the construction of the internal circulation network have gradually been lost, and many marine cities have seen their leadership and control over the internal circulation network significantly weakened.(3) No single factor is a necessary condition for achieving a high-level status of marine cities in the internal circulation network. (4) The four conditional variables of demand side, supply side, industrial linkage and inter-regional integration have two sufficient condition configurations to enhance the status of marine cities in internal circulation network. Among them, the "industryregional integration" -dominated configuration with the core of unblocking the bottlenecks of the internal circulation is the main path.

    Keywords: marine cities, internal circulation network, social network analysis, fsQCA, conditional configuration

    Received: 06 Oct 2024; Accepted: 14 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sun, Gao and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Xinyue Gao, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.