“Inspiring” Policy Transfer: Analysis of Urban Renewal in Four First-Tier Chinese Cities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

 

Firstly, I would like to thank you for your work in this field.

You did a good job!

After a comprehensive reading, I have a good experience, and I only have a few comments for the current version, which are not many but essential.

For revision details, please see the followings:

[1] I don't suggest you separate your abstract into 2 paragraphs.

[2] I have a concern about your case cites selection, because Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are the first-tier cities in China, they are worth doing this research, but your title is for Chinese cites, there are at least 684 cites. Can these 4 cities present the Chinese cities? So, I suggest you change your title and add or re-organise your research range in your title, i.g. First-tier cities in China or Megacities in China. 

[3] After reading your title and abstract, I do not really catch the meaning of 'inspiration' in this paper, is this word mandatory? If possible, maybe remove it?

[4] Table 1, could you please provide more details link in it? When I tried to log in, they are the homepage of these cities' governments, no precise information can be seen from your links.

[5] You said a lot about what has been done in this field, what are the differences between yours and theirs? what is the biggest innovation or motivation of this paper?

[6] Figure 2, I suggest you add an output section and make the logic of this figure close.

[7] I suggest you re-organise all of your tables, the format makes them unreadable.

[8] Also, I suggest you re-organise all of your figures, some of them are flattened, wrong location, etc. 

[9] You did a lot of work, but to be honest, before reading your full text, I can already imagine these arguments in your conclusions chapter. Please add and sublimate deeper innovation results in your conclusions chapter.

 

Again, I have a high comment on your contribution.

The upon-revision recommendations are helping this manuscript be more readable for readers.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.rar

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper used the qualitative analysis method to study the urban renewal policy transfer among the four first-tier cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) in China. A large number of policies were reviewed and analyzed. The timelines and policy directions of the policies were combed and organized well. This study fills the gap in Chinese city urban renewal policy study by providing a thorough and solid analytical framework. The following points need to be addressed before publishing.

1) Please separate the first section into section 1 introduction and section 2 literature review, instead of one section;

2) Several language expressions need to be double-checked to make sure they speak the real meaning. For instance, line 21 used "typical cities". Are Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen typical cities in China? If so, they contradict the fact that they are first-tier megacities in China.

3)  line 37, "unlike other developed countries," do the authors indicate China is a developed country?

4) line 183, "as the world's first-tier cities", please provide the source where the four Chinese are labelled as first-tier cities in the world.

5)line 49 - 51, the paper cited lots of policies without providing references. It is recommended to add an appendix to list all the studied policies with Chinese Pinyin and English translations and also index them. This will help reduce the table contents in the results and discussion section. 

6) Please double-check the locations of each figure and make sure they are in the right positions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.rar

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have no further comments for this manuscript.