The study on comprehensive evaluation and urbanization division at county level in China

The China's urbanization,which is in rapid development stage,presents significant regional inequality.Using the counties as basic units can reflect the spatial pattern of China's urbanization,raise the level of understanding of spatial inequality of China's urbanization,and be beneficial to the sound development of China's urbanization. This paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation system for China's county urbanization level in three aspects of urbanization connotation: population,economy and society.Entropy method is adopted to evaluate the comprehensive urbanization levels of 2289 county units in China and levels of their subsystems.Then we transform calculated values into urbanization rate based on min-max normalization and dimensionless method.Urbanization type regions are constructed according to the relationships between population urbanization and economic-social urbanization.The driving force of each urbanization type region is evaluated by partial correlation analysis.Finally,the method of spatial autocorrelation is used to regionalize the level of China's comprehensive urbanization,population urbanization,economic urbanization and social urbanization. The results show that population and economy are two major subtypes reflecting the comprehensive urbanization level of China;the spatial distribution of China's comprehensive urbanization represents a clear administrative hierarchy;China can be divided into four urbanization types,namely,population urbanization lag region;economic-social urbanization lag region,population and economic-social urbanization lag region and comprehensive urbanization non-lag region;spatial autocorrelation is an alternative approach for regionalization researches in the field of human geography.Regionalization of four kinds of urbanization types is different in pattern,mechanism and mode.In regionalization mode of population urbanization type regions,the northern region is higher than the southern region while in regionalization mode of economic and social urbanization type regions,the eastern region is higher than the western region.