High-Speed Railroad And Urbanization Policy In China

People-oriented urbanization, aiming at compact development are widely encouraged during the last decade in China.Meanwhile, one of the policies adopted by the central government to achieve the goal is High-Speed Railroad (HSR).As the backbone of the regional transportation system, HSR largely improves intercity mobility and connectivity.However, whether it improves urbanization and how it impacts on different types of cities are in heated debate.Motivated by this problem, this paper implements structure equation model(SEM) approach on the city level, and discuss the interaction between city network and HSR structured transportation network.This paper reveals that though HSR structured transportation system largely improves the overall urbanization, it still plays a limited role in middle or small cities.Also, it suggests that policymakers should not solely rely on HSR but put more concentration on city attractiveness improvement to realize tangible people-oriented urbanization.