Visualizing the pattern of origin of international visitors to Beijing and Shanghai based on mobile phone data

Abstract

There is a long tradition of understanding globalization by measuring the “world city-ness”, and there are two distinctive frameworks concerning the interrelations of the “world city network”, one of which builds upon the notion of worldwide corporate organizations and the other on the infrastructure of transport. Despite that, more studies on a single city are still required, since most cities participated in the globalization process on their own terms. Thus, the aim of this study is to visualize the patterns of origins of foreign visitors using data from mobile phones in order to better understand how China's global cities contribute to globalization in a cartogram. It is found that the strength of Shanghai’s global connections are concentrated overtly in the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, but Beijing still has the dominant role in sustaining China’s global links.