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| SPATIAL PATTERN OF URBANIZATION IN XINJIANG BASED ON ESDA |
| TANG Bing, ANWAER Maimaitiming |
| School of Geographic Science and Tourism, Xinjiang Normal University, Urumqi 830054, China |
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Abstract Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region is one of the five minority autonomous regions in China. It is located northwestern China and the hinterland of the Eurasian Continent, accounting for one sixth of Chinese territory. Xinjiang can be divided into three parts by Tianshan range. The northern part of Tianshan range is called northern Xinjiang, primarily inhabited by nomadic peoples such as Kazaks. Southern part of Tianshan range is called Southern Xinjiang. Settlements in southern Xinjiang are concentrated in the oases of Tarim basin, mainly populated by Uygurs. Estern part of Tianshan range is called Eastern Xinjiang, namely inhabited Uygurs. As a result of considerable economic growth since the Western Development Policy of 1999, Xinjiang has experienced rapid urbanization. The urban population in Xinjiang rose from 20% in 1978 to over 39% in 2010. In addition to this spectacular development, however, Xinjiang has simultaneously faced increasing gaps between its Northern and Eastern parts. With the aid of the methods of statistical analysis and ESDA, this paper analysis the temporal and spatial change of urbanization process as well as the differences of regional development in Xinjiang from the perspective of spatial correlation of the urbanization level. The research results indicate that, regional differences of urbanization level in Xinjiang have experienced two stages such as waving decrease and slow increase. From 1978 to 2009, the spatial autocorrelation Moran's I of urbanization level of different counties in Xinjiang has going up from 0.2065 to 0.4414, and indicates that, the urbanization in Xinjiang shows a concentrating trend which shows a high value and a low value spatial phenomena. and the concentration of low value has a larger proportion. The local Moran' I analysis shows that, the regional urbanization level in Xinjiang shows an abvious polarization trend, which is higher urbanization level in Nortern Xinjiang while that is lower in Southern Xinjiang. It is obvious that, a trend of central cities are gathering at the economic belt on the northern slope of Tianshan Mountain will continue for a while; in the Southern Xinjiang, however, urban development show a trend of scattering, internal clustering disparities are very small. Therefore, in the Southern Xinjiang must develop the clustering capacity of central cities.
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Received: 25 September 2011
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2012, Vol. 27 
