近三百年中国城市的国际知名度——基于大数据的描述与回归

本文利用谷歌图书的百万书籍大数据，以中国地级以上（含）城市近300年来英语书籍中出现的词频来展示和分析城市国际知名度的变迁及其特征。研究发现，北京、香港、上海、广州、南京、澳门、天津、台北、重庆和拉萨依次为近300年国际知名度的前十强。在此基础上，本文进一步对基于书籍大数据的国际知名度和媒体提及率进行基于时间序列回归的格兰杰因果检验。研究表明，近代中国大陆城市在国际媒体中的提及率显著影响其国际知名度，而港澳台城市的国际知名度和媒体提及率之间则不存在这种关联。这意味着近代以来大陆城市的国际传播主要通过媒体报道进入西方社会。本文最后总结了中国城市国际知名度获得过程的模式和特征。

International Visibility of Chinese Cities in the Last Three Centuries: A Big-Data Based Description and Regression Analysis

This study utilizes Google Books search engine generated big data to examine the development of international visibility of Chinese cities in the last three hundred years. The visibility is measured by the frequency of a city name appeared in millions of English language books. We find that among the 294 cities in our study, Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Macau, Tianjin, Taipei, Chongqing, and Lhasa come up as the top ten ones with the highest international visibility. Five factors appear to affect the international profiles of Chinese cities: (1) the city’s socioeconomic importance in international relations; (2) the city’s association with historical events; (3) the city’s visibility has its life cycle; (4) the city’s geographical affiliation with other cities; (5) international visibility cannot be definitively related to the city’s history, population size and economic elements. We place the data of international visibility and media exposure under the Granger time series regression test and found that media coverage is a significant cause on the international visibility of mainland cities but not Hong Kong and Macau. The finding implies that media coverage is the major entry point for mainland cities to gain international recognition.