Abstract
Nowadays, our daily life constantly creates and needs to utilize tremendous amounts of datasets. Fortunately, the technologies of the internet, both in software and hardware, have the capability to transmit, store, and operate big data. With China being the most populous country in the world, developing the big data industry is, therefore, seen as an urgent task. As generating industrial agglomeration is important for forming a mature industry, this study aims to characterize the phenomenon of big data industrial agglomeration in China, and to identify the factors for developing the big data industry using spatial analysis approaches and GIS technology from a geographer’s perspective. The problems and strengths of these representative cities are discussed, from which the solutions and the possible directions for the future are also provided. The findings argued that China is still at the primary stage of the development in the big data industry. Only several cities had the presence of a strong agglomeration, but the intercity space spillover was weak. However, comparing the changes in industry distribution, the trend of agglomeration have appeared, and the benefits of industrial agglomeration have also worked. The principal factors of the big data industry and its agglomeration include the support of government and the outstanding higher education agglomeration. In addition, it was also noted that each city has its own characteristics and potentials to attract more big data enterprises, talent, and investment.
Highlights
With the rapid development of information technology, the cost of data storage, data operation, and data transmission are decreasing continuously, which provides the possibility for generating and processing big data
The provinces of central and southeastern China show higher development than the western and northeastern part, Jiangxi province that is surrounded by comparatively higher development provinces is still not such flourishing in the industry of big data
Government, and citizens are concerned about the development and industrial agglomeration of the big data industry
Summary
With the rapid development of information technology, the cost of data storage, data operation, and data transmission are decreasing continuously, which provides the possibility for generating and processing big data. With technologies and resources of big data, the efficiency of business or research activities of different domains, including finance, telecommunication, public service, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, education, retail, and real estate, etc., have witnessed distinct improvement. As a nation with a population of nearly 1.4 billion and world’s second-largest economy combined with rapid economic and technological development during the past few decades (1978 to 2018), China’s digital economy has reached 27.2 trillion CNY (≈4.34 trillion USD). Its nominal growth is more than 20.3%, which is significantly higher than the nominal GDP growth (11.1%) and its added value accounts for 32.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP) (82.7 trillion CNY ≈ 13.18 trillion USD). As of September 2017, China has 0.75 billion netizens and 1.39 billion smartphone users [2], which reflects the tremendous intra market for big data industry in China
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