The Population Flow under Regional Cooperation of “City-Helps-City”: The Case of Mountain-Sea Project in Zhejiang

Regional cooperation has been increasingly recognized as indispensable in promoting coordinated regional development in China’s new urbanization. The “city-helps-city” cooperation arises as an important type of regional approach to reduce regional inequalities. This study focuses on the “city-helps-city” cooperation of the Mountain-Sea Cooperation Project in Zhejiang province and aims to examine how this type of cooperation affects the interjurisdictional linkages of backward places. First, based on the cellphone signaling data from China Mobile and social network analysis, we capture the interjurisdictional linkages represented by the population flow between poverty counties and other municipalities as our dependent variables, which are expected to be stimulated by the regional cooperation of Mountain-Sea projects. Second, through text semantic analysis on the news data of Mountain-Sea cooperation, we further identify three measures of cooperation, including the diversity of cooperation fields, the intensity of different cooperation focuses, and the legitimacy of cooperation as our main explanatory variables. Last, we run regression models to show differentiated impacts of cooperation diversity, intensity, and legitimacy on the linkages between poverty counties and developed places. The findings interrogate whether and how Mountain-Sea cooperation effectively engages backward localities in the regional network of economic production, social affairs, and institutional arrangements to enhance their linkages with other places. This study not only contributes to theoretical and empirical understandings of the state-driven “city-helps-city” cooperation as the new regional institution in transitional China, but also attempts to provide policy implications on reducing regional inequalities from the perspective of intercity cooperation.