In the current context of spatial planning of national land, delineating the urban development boundary objectively and scientifically is a key and difficult task in planning work. However, most existing methods about the delineation of urban development boundary is existing some problems such as data selection, method build and result analysis. In view of natural environment, social economy and policy orientation, a method of delineating urban development boundary automatically was been proposing based on multi-source data fusion and deep learning. Furthermore, the proposed method has been used to delimit the urban development boundary of Huadu District, Guangzhou City and analysis of influencing factors. The results show that: 1) This method can delimit the urban development boundary automatically; 2) The model’s results are highly consistent with the planning results in terms of spatial distribution trend, with a high degree of land intensive and economical use, which is more in line with the requirements of future land development; 3) Urban development is the result of a combination of multiple factors, among which transportation and population are the primary factors affecting the urban development. All in all, the proposed method can delimit the urban development boundary automatically, objectively and scientifically. What’s more, the proposed method’s results are in line with the future trend of land use development, thus can provide better guidance for China’s spatial planning of national land.

In China, investment banks play an important role as intermediaries in companies’ initial public offerings. The economic geography of investment banks is one of the keys to understanding economic dynamics. However, the existing literature pays little attention to the geographical pattern and influencing factors of China’s investment banks. Therefore, this paper takes Chinese investment banks as the research object and studies the spatial pattern and influencing factors of the service capability of investment banking departments of Chinese securities companies through their initial public offering (IPO) business. In the study of spatial pattern, this paper constructs a database of Chinese A-share IPOs from 1993 to 2020. Based on the significance of IPO amount to investment banking services, this paper puts forward a method to calculate the total value of urban investment banking services, and increases the weight of urban investment banking services according to IPO amount. In this paper, the consumer price index (CPI) is used to unify the purchasing power of the initial public offering amount of A-share listed companies in the past 30 years, and the data are standardized. In terms of the research on influencing factors, this paper collected the data of all 35 cities with investment banking service capability from 2006 to 2020, and established a two-way fixed effect regression model for analysis. The explained variable is the total value of city investment banking services, and the explanatory variables are human capital factor, city level and city innovation power. The main findings of the study are as follows: 1) China’s investment banking service pattern is primarily centered in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, forming a dense distribution pattern in the southeastern region and a sparse distribution in the northeast, northwest, and southwest China. Overall, the allocation of investment banking service resources in China is uneven, and there is a trend of spatial agglomeration; 2) Beijing is China’s investment banking service center. In addition to Shanghai and Shenzhen, cities such as Guangzhou, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Fuzhou have performed well. The mutual service levels between “Beijing-Shenzhen” and “Beijing-Shanghai” are high, and the cooperation is close. Beijing has the highest self-service value, while Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Shanghai have relatively low self-service ratios; 3) Urban human capital level, administrative level, and urban innovation capability have significant positive impacts on urban investment banking service capabilities. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that they have significant positive impacts on the investment banking service capabilities in the eastern region, while the impacts in the central, western, and northeastern China are not obvious or negative. This paper focuses on the geographical pattern of investment banks in China, and provides informative evidence on the spatial differences and influencing factors of the service capabilities of the industry, which makes up for the lack of geographical attention to investment banks in existing studies. On the other hand, from the perspective of financial geography, this paper deepens the understanding of regional development imbalance, and provides reference for further strengthening inter-regional financial cooperation, building financial center cities and studying the pattern of regional economic development in China.

The construction and improvement of the new energy industry technology transfer system is of great significance for promoting the high-quality transformation of the energy structure, the industrialization of scientific and technological achievements, and the close integration of economic development and scientific and technological innovation, and provides strong technical support for achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals. Based on the patent data of China’s new energy technology from the State Intellectual Property Office from 2001 to 2019, the study analyzes the spatio-temporal pattern of technology transfer network complexity in China’s new energy industry by constructing a directed weighted network of technology transfer, through the methods of complex network analysis, module mining, directed alternative centrality and directed alternative power model analysis. The research found that: 1) The technology transfer of China’s new energy industry has developed rapidly, and the participation of cities has been continuously increased, and the regional restrictions have been continuously broken. 2) The overall network structure shows that the scale of China’s new energy technology transfer network continues to expand, the agglomeration situation increases, and the correlation improves as a whole. But there are disadvantages such as the stability of network correlation is not strong and the network interoperability is weak. National central cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen play a spatial diffusion/agglomeration effect. The new energy technology transfer diffusion follows the technology gradient transfer law. 3) Module analysis finds that the network continuously forms a highly localized clustering characteristic of triadic closure, and the transfer effect of cities occupying structural hole locations similarly accelerates technology transfer. 4) The urban network power level can be classified as either core cities, with high centrality and high power, or peripheral cities, with low centrality and low power. The damping effect of distance influences the degree connection within a city. Other relationships exist, such as center city clusters, with high center and low power, and powerful gateway cities, with low centrality and high power cities.

China serves as the origin of numerous international rivers. Collaboration between China and the neighboring countries along these international rivers materializes primarily through international river treaties. Building on a new dataset, we map the geographical distribution of these treaties and employ qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) to investigate the combination of key factors leading to the signing of the treaties. Grounded in the theoretical framework of transboundary political ecology, this study emphasizes nature and political factors encompassing the inherent ecological attributes of rivers, the characteristics of the countries through which these rivers flow, and the interrelationships among these nations. Findings include: 1) Northeastern and southwestern regions have signed more treaties. Focal points of cooperation in these treaties encompass river management, comprehensive development and utilization, and economic collaboration. 2) Factors influencing China’s involvement in international river treaties underscore the size of the river and the diplomatic relations between riparian nations. 3) Diverse influencing factors are at play with regard to different facets of cooperation, reflecting the multifaceted and intricate nature of international river collaboration. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the determinants influencing international river cooperation and offers a reference for China to demonstrate its image as a responsible power in international cooperation.

The transport system, serving as the foundational backbone for global trade movements, significantly influences the trading relationships among domestic cities and their integration into global production networks. The existing literature has analyzed the global trade networks carried by a particular transport mode or investigated the resilience of the trade network regardless of its transportation modes, both of which neglect the transportation resilience in the global trade networks. In light of this, this study seeks to investigate the spatial evolution and structural resilience of trade networks facilitated by various transportation means through social network analysis coupled with scenario simulation techniques, based on city-level trade data extracted from General Administration of Customs. P. R. China (2000—2015). The marginal contributions of this study can be summarized as: 1) Systematically explores the evolution and characteristics of trade networks from the perspective of transportation modes, filling the gap in the existing economic geography literature where transportation networks and trade networks are disconnected; 2) Clarifies the importance and changing process of specific cities in the trade network from the perspective of transportation mode complexity; 3) Measures the resilience level of trade networks under specific transportation modes and identifies alternative city transportation networks. The key findings include: 1) Across all four transport modes, there is a consistent rise in trade network density, with waterways showing the highest density and railroads demonstrating the highest degree of network modularity. Such results indicate the maturity of waterway-based trade network and the limitations of track-dependent railway-based trade networks. 2) The development of the domestic transport infrastructure helps to mitigate the intricacy of trade connections between cities across different regions, particularly in terms of access to a variety of transportation options. Inland cities now have more access to waterway-based trade networks, and coastal cities have developed complicated trade connections with Asian or European countries carried by railways or trucks. 3) Among the transport systems, the waterway-based trade network demonstrates the highest level of resilience, followed by air-based and road-based transport networks. Over the past 15 years, the trade networks have been less dependent on top 15 ports for each transport mode, suggesting a higher level of resilience of each mode. 4) The swift progression of airport infrastructure augments the availability of alternative cities that can respond to temporary disruptions in air cargo-based trade activities, by either reduce the distance from nearest available backup cities or increase the number of nearby backup options, especially for cities in inland area. In summary, these findings offer valuable insights for national strategies aimed at refining major production configurations and bolstering the growth of strategic hinterlands. Firstly, the domestic transportation system plays a critical role offering various regions the possibility to develop multiple trade transport modes. Secondly, although railway transport along the Eurasian Land Bridge has developed rapidly in recent years, it still has limitations and falls short of the scale and system of waterway, air, and highway transport. Thirdly, when countries plan for productive force safety layouts, they need to explore potential alternative city locations based on existing foreign trade connections to ensure the resilience of foreign trade at the transportation level and smooth the transfer and handover processes between cities.