Exploring the Geography of China's Airport Networks: A Hybrid Complex-Network Approach

Air networks are normal examples of transportation systems among ubiquitous big data networks in the dynamic nature. This is particularly the case in developing countries with rapid airport network expansions. This paper explores the structure and evolution of the trunk airport network of China (ANC) in major years during 1980s-2000s. We generalise the complex network approach developed in existing studies and further test for statistical properties of weighted network characteristics by using pair-wise traffic flows. The spatiotemporal decomposition of network metric plots and the visualization maps leads to a rich harvest of stylized ANC structures: (i) national hub-and-spoke patterns surrounding mega-cities; (ii) regional broker patterns surrounding Kunming and Urumqi, and (iii) local heterogeneous disparity patterns in isolated geographical cities, such as Lhasa, Lijiang, Huangshan, etc. These findings have important implications towards understanding the geo-political and economic forces at stake in shaping China's urban systems.