Developing Smart Cities in China: An Empirical Analysis

This article describes how being pushed and pulled by a variety of external and internal factors, the Chinese government had begun to adopt and implement its smart city initiatives. Despite the strong financial and institutional supports from the central government, the performances of smart city initiatives significantly vary across pilot sites. Considering smart city initiatives as government innovation and drawing on the government innovation diffusion theories, an explanatory model has been developed to examine their variance and test it with a cross-sectional dataset using multiple regression methods. It was found that although environmental pollution was a key driver for the development of smart city in China, such environmental pollution like air pollution in particular had a curvilinear relationship (bell-shaped) with smart city development. In addition, smart cities initiatives in China were driven not only by technical rationalities but also political rationalities. Political supports from local ruling party sectaries made a difference.