THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF HIGH SPEED RAILWAYS AND URBAN NETWORKS IN CHINA: A FLOW APPROACH HAORAN YANG*, MARTIN DIJST*, PATRICK WITTE*, HANS VAN GINKEL* & WEILING YANG** * Department of Human Geography and Planning, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3508 TC, Utrecht, the Netherlands. E-mails: H.Yang2@uu.nl; M.J.Dijst@uu.nl; P.A.Witte@uu.nl ** School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, 220, Handan RD, Shanghai, China. E-mail: kmyangweiling@126.com Received: March 2016; accepted February 2017 ABSTRACT The high speed railway (HSR) has played a crucial role in the regional integration of urban networks in China. This paper analyses HSR passenger flows instead of commonly-used time schedules for measuring different polycentricity in urban networks. Using 2013 origin/ destination (O/D) passenger flow data, we analyse the spatial configurations of 99 HSR cities at the national scale in China. In addition, we compare the spatial configurations of three regional urban networks: the Pearl River Delta, the Yangzi River Delta and the Bohai Rim. The outcomes show that the three functional regions connected by HSR are the most dominant polycentric regions in China and that the Bohai Rim is less hierarchical than the other two. We conclude that the comprehensive Chinese HSR networks are largely polycentric, especially in the central and eastern regions. Key words: High speed railway (HSR), urban networks, flow approach, China, polycentricity INTRODUCTION Over the past few decades, the high speed railway (HSR) has become an important component of transportation systems, and it has played a key role in economic and social development in vari- ous countries. The first Japanese HSR corridor, Tokyo-Osaka, was inaugurated in 1964. Since then, other types of typical hybrid HSR networks have been developed in Europe, such as the TGV in France and the ICE in Germany (Givoni 2006; Hall 2013). The speed and frequency of the HSR and its spatial network structures can to a large extent change the time-space relation- ships between cities by means of changed accessibility (Banister & Givoni 2013), relocated agglomeration economies (Vickerman & Ulied 2006; Chen & Hall 2012) and changed travel behaviours for various business, leisure and rec- reational activities, which are in favour of more functionally interacting polycentric urban net- works (Garmendia & Romero 2012; Verma et al. 2013). The Chinese HSR network is now the larg- est railway infrastructure construction project in the world. It has characteristics of both the Japanese corridor system and the European hybrid networks (Perl & Goetz 2015). By July 2013, China’s HSR network (9,760 km) accounted for 46 per cent of the world total (UIC 2013). It is expected that by the year 2020, no fewer than 16,000 km of dedicated HSR trunk lines and 40,000 km of mixed and updated HSR lines will connect Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2018, DOI:10.1111/tesg.12269, Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 109–128. V C 2017 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG