City Development Level-Based Regional Division: A Case Study of China's Cities

Traditional regional divisions based solely on geographic location fail to account for the economic disparities among cities within a region. To address this limitation, this study proposes a new regional division method that considers the development levels of cities. Utilizing the official '2020 Business Attractiveness Ranking of China's Cities', we construct a trend graph based on the city rankings (Figure 2). This graph provides a visual representation of the distribution of city development levels, enabling a more nuanced and accurate regional division.