Place branding is a growing academic field, and the number of studies about place branding has proliferated in the literature in recent years. However, how the organizational environment around Chinese cities affects city branding strategies is still understudied. This contribution examines how the use of city labels has evolved in the Pearl River Delta since 2000 and explains the changes by three possible propositions: (1) self-reflection based on a city's economic and regional position, (2) vertical inspiration from the national and provincial level governments, and (3) horizontal imitation from fellow municipal governments. It appears that cities in the Pearl River Delta encouraged the tertiary sector and pursued green images in their labelling choices until 2015. Municipalities tended to follow policies formulated by higher level governments and practices of pioneer cities, while since 2015 their strategies have become more self-reflective, mature and consistent. Compared with Western cities, municipal branding is more sensitive to influence from higher level government policies.

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Against the background of globalization, city branding has become a useful strategy utilized by decision-makers in cities to promote their cities in the race for limited resources. Urban transformation factors, i.e., economic development stage and geographic position play an important role in city branding choices. We argue that city branding choices of a city can be affected by other cities through city interactions and networking. The effects of city interactions can spread across cities either through spatial proximity-referring physical or geographic connections, or logical proximity-representing city interconnectivity caused by collaboration activities. To test our argument, we develop a two-layer network model using the generalized modeling framework (GEMF) to model city branding choices, based on empirical data of sustainable brand developmental pathways from the three economic regions in China. We examine the general evolution pattern of city branding practices and construct different scenarios to analyze the impact of city interactions. The results indicate that taking city interactions as an additional factor to urban transformation allows for a better prediction on city branding choices. Policy-makers and urban planners need to consider infrastructure and economic development policies in designing city branding strategies.

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The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is one of the largest and fastest growing urbanized deltas in China and the world. Its municipalities hope to attract investors, firms, high-quality labour force and residents in line with ecological modernization. They do so by using a variety of attractive city labels, such as eco city, low carbon city, and smart city. The physical shape these city labels take is best exemplified in the emergence of large new towns at the fringes of existing urban areas. Few studies to date unearth empirical evidence as to how municipal governments in China implement their smart eco city ambitions. This study does precisely that by examining how concrete policy networks at the local level develop new towns in the Pearl River Delta. The Policy Network Theory is used to map the positions actors have in three different new town projects in Shenzhen, Foshan, and Zhuhai respectively. It explains project progress or lack thereof by studying the organizational constellations that structure the interactions among actors and how the constellations affect their resources exchange. Our analysis suggests that in the various arenas where policy actors meet each other and are supposed to exchange resources and work out viable policy packages, blockades exist preventing such exchanges from happening. This creates impasses to which different cities have found different institutional and organizational answers.

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The past decade has seen a surge in the use of city branding, which is used to attract specific target groups of investors, high-tech green firms and talented workforce and reflects a desired shift from old, polluting manufacturing industries to new, clean service industries. Previous studies in the Chinese mega-city regions Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Jing-Jin-Ji (region around Beijing and Tianjin) have shown that branding practices of primarily service and innovation oriented cities are largely in line with existing industrial profiles while those which are predominantly manufacturing oriented wish to present themselves as more service and innovation driven. In this contribution, city branding practices are studied in China's three Northeastern provinces Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning which face structural decline because of the presence of many outdated resource-based and heavy industries. The gap between existing profile and branding choices appears not systematic as in China's leading economic regions. Northeastern cities focus more on combining primary, secondary and tertiary industrial patterns than on displacing manufacturing with services. The tertiary sector in these provinces is more administrative and public sector oriented and generates lower value added; it is therefore not significantly more attractive than the primary and secondary ones.

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In the past four decades, China has experienced unprecedented rates of urban growth. This remarkable urbanization has also created challenges for China’s environment. To protect the environment, the Chinese national government has issued several policies while still maintaining high economic growth, such as Scientific Approach to Development in 2003 and Ecological Civilization in 2007. Furthermore, ecological principles, such as intensive, smart, green, and low-carbon, were further confirmed in the urbanization process in the National New Urbanization Plan in 2014 (State Council, 2014). However, the policy scopes are broad, and goals are also ambiguous in the corresponding policy documents. Facing devastating environmental problems, Chinese regions and cities respond by trying to attract economic activity with higher economic value and lower environmental cost. The proliferation of environmental concerns in place brands reveals influence from national government. These place identities and labels should go beyond mere intentions. The regional and municipal governments have an obligation to promote sustainable development initiatives listed in their policy plans. In the process of urban expansion, new towns are archetypes of urban projects to flesh out these sustainable development initiatives in China. This dissertation studies regional and city branding in China from two angles, i.e., place branding and the intergovernmental context. First, place branding process focuses on the development stages of regional and city brands, which uncovers brand identities and labels in planning documents, as well as city images created around urban projects. Second, the intergovernmental context further addresses the interactions among different levels of governments in the decision-making regarding brand identities and labels, as well as private actors in urban projects...@en

As global cities, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing operate in international economic networks; however, they are also each firmly embedded within a regional context and are surrounded by less populous and less internationally recognized neighbors. Together they form so-called mega-city regions referred to as the Greater Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Bohai Rim, each encompassing a dozen or so cities. In the wake of staggering economic growth and threatening pollution, these cities are compelled to respond to the challenge of ecological modernization (EM): aim for higher economic value added at lower environmental cost. Cities have particular industrial and regional profiles; consequently they follow different developmental pathways. In order to attract coveted investors, green and high-tech corporations, well-endowed residents and talented workforce, these cities engage in city branding practices. In this contribution, a typology of EM developmental pathways is presented and the 41 cities in the three Chinese mega-city regions are analyzed in terms of their respective pathways and city branding practices. We argue that different industrial and regional profiles allow for different developmental pathways making different city branding strategies likely. Most cities brand themselves in comformity with what their pathway would lead us to predict, except cities with a strongly manufacturing oriented profile; the brands of the latter type deviate markedly from their current reality. Cities adopting branding strategies that contrast sharply with their historical legacy and current profile risk promoting themselves in ways that the outside world is likely to perceive as lacking in credibility.@en

Due to its simple mechanical structure and high motion stability, the H-shaped platform has been increasingly widely used in precision measuring, numerical control machining and semiconductor packaging equipment, etc. The H-shaped platform is normally driven by multiple (three) permanent magnet synchronous linear motors. The main challenges for H-shaped platform-control include synchronous control between the two linear motors in the Y direction as well as total positioning error of the platform mover, a combination of position deviation in X and Y directions. To deal with the above challenges, this paper proposes a control strategy based on the inverse system method through state feedback and dynamic decoupling of the thrust force. First, mechanical dynamics equations have been deduced through the analysis of system coupling based on the platform structure. Second, the mathematical model of the linear motors and the relevant coordinate transformation between dq-axis currents and ABC-phase currents are analyzed. Third, after the main concept of inverse system method being explained, the inverse system model of the platform control system has been designed after defining relevant system variables. Inverse system model compensates the original nonlinear coupled system into pseudo-linear decoupled linear system, for which typical linear control methods, like PID, can be adopted to control the system. The simulation model of the control system is built in MATLAB/Simulink and the simulation result shows that the designed control system has both small synchronous deviation and small total trajectory tracking error. Furthermore, the control program has been run on NI controller for both fixed-loop-time and free-loop-time modes, and the test result shows that the average loop computation time needed is rather small, which makes it suitable for real industrial applications. Overall, it proves that the proposed new control strategy can be used in industrial applications that have high-precision and high real-time performance requirements@en

In the urban development policy in China, city brands play an important role in setting targets for Chinese cities. These economic city brands, however, are not produced in an institutional vacuum: they are embedded in the visions national, provincial and municipal governments have for these cities, i.e., on multi-level governance. In this paper, a data-intense analysis of economic city branding practices has been conducted in the Greater Pearl River Delta, taking into account national, provincial and municipal documents in socio-economic, urban and land use planning. Evidence of economic and ecological initiatives through branding at the level of symbolic urban projects, such as new towns, has also been examined. It transpires that Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have adopted more sophisticated economic brand identities than the others and the reflection of brand-related targets from their actual projects is also more credible. While China’s national plans focus primarily on Hong Kong and Macau, provincial documents place more emphasis on the wealthier cities on the mainland (Shenzhen and Guangzhou). The other cities attract less attention and have more freedom to adopt economic city brands, but their efforts to live up to their promise are quite limited due to their weak financial position.@en