The internet and the rise of information network cities in China

Advanced information and telecommunication technology has brought human being into a new information age, resulting in the emerging of an informational, global, and networked society. In the 1990s, the rapid growth of the Internet not only had strong impacts on the social and economic fields, but also restructed the organizations of global physical and virtual spaces. In recent years, the scholarly reseach on Internet has rapidly increased in many fields such as urban geography in the western developed countries. However, little research on the cities of developing countries exists in the Internet studies literature, and almost none address the topic of China, despite of their obvious implications for urban development in China. This paper seeks to fill gap and understand the impact of Internet on the urban system in China. Based on the measurementof Internet backbone networks, it analyses the spatial structure of the Internet city network and ranks these cities in China. Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and their linkages constitute the core level of long-distance telecommunication network. The investments in infrastructure are rewriting the map of competitive advantage of cities. An urban network of the information network cities is emerging in which the geographical factor plays an impotant role.