Zeng Gang I. Background of National Strategies and Expectations of the Central Government The integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Project, as two of China’s five major development strategies, are of particular significance in this era. Take an important position among the six major urban agglomerations worldwide and the five urban agglomerations nationwide From a global perspective, we can find that 30% of the earth’s land surface is in the northern hemisphere, and mainly concentrated in the three major plates with 8-hour time difference, namely the Western European plate with two urban agglomerations centering on London and Paris respectively, the North American plate with two urban agglomerations focusing on Chicago and New York respectively, and the East Asian plate with two urban agglomerations centering on Tokyo and Shanghai respectively. The six cities form a stable hexagon, which was proposed by the famous German scholar August Lösch. The French scholar Gottman believes that there are six major urban agglomerations in the world, and the strategists who make deployments in the six urban agglomerations can run a 24-hour business operation everyday (relay of three 8 working hours in the daytime), and become the winner of the entire world. Among the six major urban agglomerations, five are in developed countries, and only the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (YRDUA) is in a developing country. Compared with urban agglomerations in developed countries, the average development of cities in YRDUA is sub-par. But located near the Yangtze River, the agglomeration occupies a huge hinterland area in China. In 2019, the GDP of YRDUA surpassed that of the London-centered Urban Agglomeration and Paris-centered Urban Agglomeration in Northwestern Europe. Besides, its potential for growth goes far beyond that of the other five major urban agglomerations, fully demonstrating the advantage of an up-rising star. Looking back to China, three of the five urban agglomerations in the first group nationwide lie in coastal areas. In the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration, Beijing and Tianjin occupy prominent positions. However, the connections among the cities are yet to be improved, and the brightness varies greatly at different parts of the night-time light remote sensing image of the agglomeration. The brightness of the image in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is very high, with an obvious external boundary, high level of internal integration, but a relatively small hinterland area. The YRDUA covering a large area and forming a Z-shaped axis from Hefei, Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou to Ningbo has a relatively large space for outward expansion. In 2019, the combined GDP of the three provinces (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui) and one city (Shanghai) in the Yangtze River Delta reached RMB 23.7 trillion, accounting for 24% of the national total. Shanghai still took a leading and prominent position in YRDUA in terms of economic aggregate. Lead the innovative development of domestic urban agglomerations and the big development trend of digital industry The number of enterprises on the STAR Market is an important indicator to reflect regional economic vitality. According to the list of the number of enterprises on the STAR Market in Chinese cities with GDP reaching or surpassing a trillion yuan in 2019 released by Jiangnan University in September 2020, among the 16 cities, Beijing has 29 enterprises, ranking first. Shanghai has 26, ranking second, but the number reaches 57, accounting for nearly 50% of the total, when added with those of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Nanjing, and Ningbo that also belong to YRDUA. It can be seen from the ranking of China’s innovative subjects released by Tsinghua University in September 2020 that among the top 20 cities, Beijing and Shenzhen rank first and second respectively. Shanghai ranks third. However, together with Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Ningbo, Wuxi, Hefei, etc., YRDUA has an absolute advantage in the innovation environment, and takes a prominent position in China’s innovative development. The Yangtze River Delta is one of the regions with the most active economic development nationwide, and Shanghai is China’s economic center. In the first half of 2020, Shanghai’s GDP ranked first among all cities. Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing were included in the top ten cities in terms of GDP. Meanwhile, the economy of the Yangtze River Delta is growing vigorously, with remarkable achievements in the development of the digital economy. The Covid-19 pandemic has promoted the digital economy to give full play to its advantages. In the first quarter of 2020, the output of Hangzhou’s manufacturing industry fell by 5%-10% year on year, but its digital economy rose by 6.1% year on year against the downward trend, making important contributions to Hangzhou’s GDP growth of 2% in the first quarter of 2020. Hangzhou has become the city with best performance in the digital economy. It is necessary to implement the dual-cycle strategy and ensure supply chain security to rebuild the relations between China and the West The tension between China and the West affects supply chain security. China’s coastal areas rely heavily on the imports from foreign countries, and the performances of various sectors are not fully in sync. There is a trade surplus in general industrial products, but a trade deficit in services, especially intellectual property. According to statistics from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from 2001 to 2017, China’s payments for foreign intellectual property increased by an average annual rate of 17%, compared with the global figure of 7.85% during the same period. According to statistics from the Ministry of Commerce, the royalty fee paid by China for foreign intellectual property in 2017 reached US$ 28.6 billion, with a trade deficit of US$ 20+ billion. These figures are amazing. According to the high-level officials of the Ministry of Commerce, 95% of China’s key parts and components rely on imports, and it is urgent for the country to conduct independent research of key technologies at core links. Meanwhile, Western countries are clamoring to decouple from China, which has even become a social consensus. Therefore, in response to changes unseen in a century, it is urgent for us to deeply understand the significance and value of the central government’s strategic deployment in forming a new development pattern whereby domestic and foreign markets can boost each other, with the domestic market as the mainstay. Besides, it’s imperative to give full play to the backbone role of YRDUA in the macroeconomic development based on the new characteristics and trends of economic globalization, which are integrated regional development and grouplization. The central government expects the Yangtze River Delta to guarantee domestic supply of high technologies The central government has paid special attention to the integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta. On May 30, 2019, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council jointly issued the Master Plan for Integrated Regional Development of Yangtze River Delta, which was an internal component focusing on the goals, guidelines and ideas of promoting integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta. On December 1, 2019, a document of the same name was promulgated, which was an open document clarifying work priorities, key projects and implementation methods. The two complementary documents make a systematic plan for the integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta. It was the first time that the central government issued two documents on the same topic within a short period, which reflected that it paid special attention to the integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta. Here are some key points in the development strategy. First, it clearly points out that Shanghai should further play a leading role, while Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui should play to their own strengths. It emphasizes that the main purpose of integrated development is to promote the modern high-end elements to cross administrative borders and make exchanges, turn the advantages of the three provinces and one city into common advantages of the region, and take the lead in achieving overall high-quality development. Secondly, it proposes new ideas for the integrated development, namely establishing an investment fund for the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, and focusing on the building of a regional innovation community, joint governance of the ecological environment and cross-regional infrastructure construction. Thirdly, it puts forward the core task, which is to bring together scientific and technological forces in the near future to jointly tackle key problems and increase the supply of high technologies. II. The Evaluation Indicator System for Integrated Development Capabilities of Cities in the Yangtze River Delta In order to respond to the national strategy for the integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta and figure out the cities’ capabilities for the integrated development, we have absorbed the essence of the theories regarding Social-Economic-Natural Complex Ecosystem, Regional Innovation System and Relational Economics, and followed the three principles of combining science and operability, being both forward-looking and realistic, and integrating internationality with locality. In the end, we have established a system of 20 indicators covering the four aspects, namely economic development, scientific and technological innovation, exchange services and ecological support. We have calculated and analyzed the integrated development capability of the 41 cities at the prefecture level and above in the Yangtze River Delta with the help of quantitative calculation tools such as the weighted average, standardized method, space analysis and Rank-Size Rule. It is particularly worth mentioning that in the process of building the indicator system, we focused on cities’ external service capabilities instead of the size, especially on the capital investment, process control and results of their efforts to promote the scientific and technological innovation, transportation and communications, headquarters economy of the surrounding cities, and protect their own ecological environments. Besides, we have tried our best to reflect the development concept of innovation, harmonization, green, openness and sharing in the new era, as well as the two keywords - “integration” and “high-quality” in the process of integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta. III. Characteristics of the Integrated Development of the Yangtze River Delta The “core-periphery” structure of the cities’ integrated development capabilities is obvious and stable, with a prominent feature of the Z-shaped development axis The cities in the east have higher coordinated development capabilities than those in the west in the Yangtze River Delta region. A Z-shaped axis with Shanghai as the center and Hefei, Nanjing, Wuxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo as nodes has come into being, with an obvious “core-periphery” spatial structure. Through breaking point analysis and according to the different capabilities for integrated development, cities in the Yangtze River Delta region can be divided into the leading city that is Shanghai, the hub city that is Nanjing, 13 important node cities that include Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Hefei, Wenzhou, etc., 11 general node cities such as Jiaxing, and 10 local cities such as Suzhou in Anhui Province. In addition, unlike other urban agglomerations such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the cities with a high level of integrated development in the Yangtze River Delta take a solid position. Although the gap between the central city and generic cities is narrowing, the “core-periphery” structure remains stable with few changes. Meanwhile, the calculation results show that the coordinated development capabilities and ranking of cities in the Yangtze River Delta approximately obeyed Zipf rank-size distribution. The goodness of fit between the logarithm of the score and the ranking reached 80.13%, representing high reliability of the statistics. Given the high-level of economic integration among cities, innovation is an important way to narrow the gap among different cities Judging from the performance of indicators of sub-fields, economic development and exchange services have contributed the most to the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta. However, cities vary greatly in the scientific and technological innovation capabilities. Except the five cities, namely Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Hefei, other cities in the Yangtze River Delta are faced with the arduous task of transitioning and transforming from sweat-driven to innovation-driven development. In addition, the regression calculation results show that there is a good interactive relationship among the economic development, scientific and technological innovation and exchange services of cities in the Yangtze River Delta, but an insignificant negative relationship in ecological support. The cities still have a long way to go in the construction of ecological civilization. In other words, efforts should be made to follow the trends of the times with high-end scientific and technological innovation resources concentrating in central cities and general processing industries shifting to surrounding small and medium-sized cities, and fulfill the important task of promoting industry-university-research collaboration across administrative boundaries of the cities. The Yangtze River Delta has completed the development stage of a “small world” and entered a new stage of overall integration Whether it is from the perspective of comprehensive capability or coordinated development capabilities in the four sub-fields, namely economy, innovation, facilities and ecology, the Moran’s index of cities in the Yangtze River Delta remains at the insignificant level of 10%. This shows that the 41 cities in YRDUA have went through the development stage of a “small world” or a “small group” and entered the development stage of integration. It also means that we have achieved the goals in the Master Plan for Integrated Regional Development of Yangtze River Delta released by the State Council in June 2016 ahead of schedule. (Author: Zeng Gang, Dean of Institute of Urban Development of East China Normal University, and Director of Research Center of Regional Integrated Development of the Yangtze River Delta in Shanghai Social Science Innovation Research Base)