Abstract：The 14th Five-Year Plan is a crucial strategic period for high-quality development. However, China is confronting a world with increasing uncertainties. It is also urgent to respond to emerging multi-dimensional challenges, such as improving living standards, boosting domestic demands, protecting the environment, reforming the supply-side, and enhancing governance capacity. All these changes call for a new strategy option and solution.The “Qinling Mountains and Huaihe River” boundary has shaped China’s heating system since the 1950s. Because of the less-developed economy and limited energy resources, the district heating system is only applicable for the Northern Chinese cities. However, stimulated by the continuous income growth and demand for better space-heating services in the past four decades, a robust heating market is growing and emerging in the Southern cities. Our study offers a new option to support high-quality development by developing heating markets in the Southern cities for the first time. We present the feasibility of this new option by identifying theoretical mechanisms, discussing practical heating patterns, and assessing the market potential for the Southern cities. Our work contributes to the existing knowledge in three aspects as follows.First, we establish an analytical framework to examine how the heating industry affects high-quality development. Then, we identify five beneficial effects when developing the heating industry in the Southern cities. These effects include meeting households’ demands for better livelihood, contributing to employment and economic growth, driving the heating industry to technology change, promoting energy systems to exploit local renewable energy, and improving the resilience of urban management.Second, we discuss the heating pattern in the Southern cities. The present Northern cities’ district heating systems, associated with heavy financial burdens, high energy dependency, and severe environmental pollution, serve as a benchmark. With the disparity in heating habits and rising environmental concerns, we argue that developing a government-oriented district heating system is unsuitable for the Southern cities. Instead, a market-based distributed heating system is an option.Third, we establish the assessment framework of the heating market in the Southern cities. There are three elements in building up the heating market: effective supply, adequate demand, and efficient policy support. An empirical assessment of the development potential of the heating market is applied with 133 prefecture-level cities to present the overall picture of the present development level in the Southern cities. The results show that most of these cities are at the initial start-up stage. There is a great regional disparity: cities in the eastern area have greater potential than their western counterparts. Among all cities, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Hangzhou, Hefei, Zhenjiang, Changzhou, Wuhan, Ningbo are the top-10 with the highest market potentials.
张晓萌, 魏楚. 发展南方城市供暖：高质量发展的一个新思路[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2021, 51(6): 167-186.
Zhang Xiaomeng, Wei Chu. Developing Heating Systems in Southern Cities: A New Option of High-quality Development. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2021, 51(6): 167-186.
2021, Vol. 51 
