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The configurations of Chinese national urban systems in both high-speed railway and airline networks

Up to now, a great deal of the existing literature have been focused on functional relationships
of urban systems by using schedule seat airline flow data across the world (Smith & Timberlake
2001; Derudder & Witlox 2005; Derudder & Witlox 2009; Van Nuffel et al. 2010). However, HSR
travel has received less attention and the few available studies on the functional relationships
of urban systems in Europe (Hall and Pain, 2006) and China (Zhang et al., 2016) at the regional
or sub-regional scales are based on time schedule HSR data. Like airline travel, HSR has been
considered alone instead of jointly with other longdistance transportation modes. The only
exception is the study of Xiao et al. (2013) who used passenger data of conventional railways
and airlines to estimate a reversed gravity model to identify attractions of a limited number of
cities in China. To the best of our knowledge, no study is available on the comparisons of urban
systems in both two high-speed transportation networks at the same national scale and by
using the same type of passenger flow data. Our research tries to fill these gaps. Thus, the key
research question in this paper is how the use of both networks articulates the configuration
of national urban systems using the actual HSR and air passenger flows. This is of particular
interest for two reasons. First, as we will argue in the next section, the functional relationships
of urban systems at a larger spatial scale would be better reflected by passenger flows travelling
(i.e. the demand side) than by the provision of rail or air services (i.e. the supply side) (Yang et
al., 2017). Second, both HSR and airline networks in China mainly carry people from the middle
to upper-middle classes, that is, social groups that have stronger travel demands for functional
activities such as high-end business, advanced producer services and tourism (Delaplace and
Dobruszkes, 2016; Liu and Kesteloot, 2015). The relevant functional relationships of urban
systems might differ in both high-speed transportation networks with their different network
properties. Consequentially, the comparisons of the configurations of urban systems in both
transportation networks could provide an insight into the future high-speed transportation and
urban system planning.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review. Section 3 explains
our analytical framework, after which we introduce both HSR and airline O/D flow data. In
Section 4, the results of our analyses are discussed, which consist of a general overview of
HSR and airline passenger flows at the national scale. This section is followed by a comparison
between them. The final section comprises the conclusions of the paper and an outlook on some
future research issues.
2. Literature review

For understanding the functional relationships between cities, studies on transport networks
have taken a prominent role in the space of flows at different spatial scales. The traditional
internal “space of places” has given way to the external “space of flows” proposed by
Castells (1996), which emphasizes functional relationships between cities. In the theory
of “space of flows”, there are three layers determining the flows of information, people,
and capital. The first layer is the infrastructure layer of the material support for the flows.
The second layer contains different nodes and hubs which are connected and organized by
the infrastructure layer. The third layer is that people exercise the directional functions
( Derudder & Taylor 2005).
As to the three layers, two types of popular empirical approaches emerged to assess
the external flows among cities. The first approach is based on the derived flows of
advanced tele-information contacts (Devriendt et al., 2010), advanced producer services
(APS) (Zhao et al., 2015), and business elite contacts (Beaverstock, 2004) within the
three layers. However, strong criticisms exist on the ‘derived flow approach’. The main
argument is that it cannot reflect the extent to which the internal characteristics of

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